State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship and Democratisation 9781350988217, 9781838609139

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Benjamin Isakhan is Associate Professor of Politics and Policy Studies and Founding Director of POLIS, a research network for Political Science and International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. He is also Adjunct Senior Research Associate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics, Discourse (2012) and the editor of six books including, most recently, The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (2016). Ben’s current research includes a three-year funded project entitled ‘Measuring Heritage Destruction in Iraq and Syria’. Shamiran Mako is a lecturer at the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include ‘Iraq: who’s to blame?’ in the World Affairs Journal, ‘International response to Bahrain’s Arab Spring’ in e-International Relations and ‘Cultural genocide and key international instruments: framing the indigenous experience’ in the International Journal of Minority and Group Rights. Fadi Dawood is a senior research fellow at the NATO Association of Canada and Sessional Lecturer at Lakehead University, Orillia Campus. He is a historian of the Modern Middle East with special focus on minority populations in Iraq. His PhD dissertation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, examines the Assyrian population in modern Iraq. He has taught Middle East, History and Political Science courses at SOAS, University of London and Lakehead University in Canada.

“A comprehensive review of Iraq’s history and main challenges from the creation of the state to the present day. The volume adds to our knowledge of Iraq and raises intriguing questions about its historiography. Students of Iraq’s history will find this book valuable.” Joseph Sassoon, Associate Professor and Al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World, Georgetown University “A highly important contribution to our thinking about modern Iraq, this excellent research relies on new archival materials and engages in key conversations on Iraqi statehood, forms of governance, citizenship and minority politics, which will inspire many in the field.” Orit Bashkin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of Chicago

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State and Society in Iraq

Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship and Democratisation

EDITED BY BENJAMIN ISAKHAN SHAMIRAN MAKO FADI DAWOOD

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright Editorial Selection © 2017 Benjamin Isakhan, Shamiran Mako and Fadi Dawood Copyright Individual Chapters © 2017 Amatzia Baram, Alda Benjamen, Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Fadi Dawood, Sargon George Donabed, Samuel Helfont, Benjamin Isakhan, Hilary Falb Kalisman, Marc Lemieux, Shamiran Mako, Ibrahim Al-Marashi, Hilla Peled-Shapira, Peter Sluglett, Gareth Stansfield, Jordi Tejel. The right of Benjamin Isakhan, Shamiran Mako and Fadi Dawood to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Modern Middle East Studies 195 ISBN: 978 1 78453 319 9 eISBN: 978 1 83860 912 2 ePDF: 978 1 83860 913 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

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Preface: Whither Iraq? Peter Sluglett

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Introduction: State–Society Relations in Iraq: Negotiating a Contested Historiography

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Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood PART I: COLONIAL RULE AND THE MAKING OF MODERN IRAQ

1

The Ba‘qubah Refugee Camp, 1919–22: State–Society Relations in Occupied Iraq

31

Fadi Dawood 2

State–Society Relations in the Urban Spheres of Baghdad and Kirkuk, 1920–58

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Arbella Bet-Shlimon 3

‘The Government is the Servant of the People’: State and Society in the Short Stories of Shakir Khuṣbak and Gha’ib Ṭu’ma Farman

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Hilla Peled-Shapira 4

Education Policy in Iraq, 1921–58: Competing Visions of the State

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Hilary Falb Kalisman 5

Military–Society Relations in Iraq, 1921–58: Competing Roles of the Army Ibrahim Al-Marashi v

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CONTENTS PART II: REPUBLICAN IRAQ: STATE–SOCIETY RELATIONS UNDER AUTHORITARIAN RULE

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‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Student Movements of the First Iraqi Republic, 1958–63

135

Jordi Tejel 7

Assyrians and the Early Ba‘thist Period in Iraq: Between State and Non-State Actors

156

Alda Benjamen and Sargon George Donabed 8

Ba‘thi Iraq in the 1970s: Historiography of Medieval Islam and Contemporary Politics

177

Amatzia Baram 9

Ba‘thist Penetration of Shi‘a Religious Institutions

197

Samuel Helfont PART III:  COMMUNAL STRIFE AND RE-EMERGENT AUTHORITARIANISM IN POST-2003 IRAQ

10 The Consolidation of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Integrity of the Iraqi State

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Gareth Stansfield 11 Political Parties, Elections and the Transformation of Iraqi Politics Since 2003

238

Marc Lemieux and Shamiran Mako 12 The Road to the ‘Islamic State’: State–Society Relations after the US Withdrawal from Iraq

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Benjamin Isakhan Conclusion: Lessons from the Past for a Future Iraq

280

Benjamin Isakhan and Shamiran Mako Bibliography Index

289 317

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Acknowledgements Since the American-led invasion of 2003, much scholarship on Iraq has addressed the complex web of interactions that have affected statebuilding throughout Iraqi history. This book contributes to the evolving debate about the nature of the Iraqi state and its capacity to govern its diverse and fragmented society. It takes a temporal view of the historical and contemporary challenges to statebuilding by focusing on the processes that have affected social, economic, and political fissures since the founding of the Iraqi state. Via an examination of the state’s developmental trajectory across three important periods, contributors to this volume highlight the multifaceted and fluid dynamics that have both determined and shaped societal interactions and the state’s response to those forces. As an interdisciplinary work that emphasises a longitudinal and contextual analysis of evolving state–society relations in Iraq, the volume is a seminal contribution to the field of Iraqi studies and to the broader scholarship on state– society relations in the Middle East and North Africa. Bringing a volume of this magnitude to fruition is no easy task, particularly given the diversity of the chapters and authors’ expertise. We would like to thank each of them for the timely delivery of quality chapters. The professionalism and calibre of the authors involved and their detailed knowledge of the subject matter made the job of editing this volume a pleasure. This book would not have come to fruition without the generous support of several significant institutions and their staff. Firstly, Benjamin would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Australian Research Council (DE120100315), the Middle East Studies Forum within the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Shamiran is grateful to the faculty and staff at the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies and Northeastern University and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, as well as colleagues at the University of vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Edinburgh’s Politics and International Relations department. Shamiran is greatly indebted to professors Wilfried Swenden and Adham Saouli for their constructive input on the evolving role of the state in society. Fadi would like to thank the Department of History at SOAS, University of London, and particularly colleagues who helped sharpen the intellectual focus of the volume. We are also grateful to the two anonymous referees who read earlier versions of the chapters, as well as the staff of I.B.Tauris who have contributed to the production of this book, particularly Maria Marsh, Azmina Siddique and Sophie Rudland for their initial interest and confidence in the work. For the purposes of this volume, Arabic, Kurdish and any other non-English words have been transliterated to their simplest possible English equivalent. We have avoided the use of diacritical marks as many words in the volume will already be familiar to our readership (Ba‘th, Al Qaeda), while linguists and experts will recognise the simplified English transliteration. Finally, on a more personal note, Ben would like to thank his family and friends for their much-needed words of encouragement and love. Special mention must go to the ever-supportive and always patient Lyndal Isakhan and little Thomas Isakhan, who makes all the hard work so worthwhile. As always, Shamiran is especially grateful for the love and support of Sargon and Tiamat. Fadi would like to thank his family and particularly his parents Isaam Dawood and Raika Abdulahad and his sister Massarah for allowing him to spend so much time thinking and talking about the Middle East and Iraq.

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Notes on Contributors Amatzia Baram is Professor Emeritus at the Department of History of the Middle East and Director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa. His areas of expertise are Iraqi politics, religion, culture and society; tribe and state in the Middle East; the Arab Shi‘a; and political Islam. Among his many publications are Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968– 2003: Ba‘thi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (2014), and Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba‘thist Iraq: 1968–1989 (1991). Alda Benjamen received her PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park and her master’s degree from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto in 2008. She is a fellow at the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq. Her research contextualises the Assyrians in Iraqi history. She is also interested in the role of women in these movements and their portrayal by intellectuals. She is the author of ‘Assyrians in Iraq’s Nineveh Plains: grass-root organizations and inter-communal conflict’, TAARII Newsletter. Arbella Bet-Shlimon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. She specialises in the history of Iraq, the Persian Gulf region, urban history and the politics of oil. She is the author of ‘Group identities, oil, and the local political domain in Kirkuk:  a historical perspective’, Journal of Urban History. Her first book project, currently in progress, is a history of the city of Kirkuk in the twentieth century. Her work has been funded by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq and the American Historical Association. Fadi Dawood is a senior research fellow at the NATO Association of Canada and Sessional Lecturer at Lakehead University, Orillia Campus. He is a historian of the Modern Middle East with special focus on minority populations in Iraq. His PhD dissertation at the School of Oriental and African ix

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Studies (SOAS), University of London, examines the Assyrian population in modern Iraq. He has taught Middle East, History and Political Science courses at SOAS, University of London and Lakehead University in Canada. Sargon George Donabed is Associate Professor of History at Roger Williams University. Donabed is the author of Reforging a Forgotten History (2015), co-editor of Decentering Discussions on Religion and State: Emerging Narratives, Challenging Perspectives (2015), co-editor of The Assyrian Heritage: Threads of Continuity and Influence (2012), and author of ‘Rethinking nationalism and an appellative conundrum: historiography and politics in Iraq’ in National Identities. He is a recipient of the American Academic Research Institute Iraq (TAARII) grant for his work on the folklore of Iraq. Samuel Helfont received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where his research focused on the relationship between religion and state during Iraq’s Ba‘thist period. He holds master’s degrees in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and in Middle Eastern History from Tel Aviv University, as well as a BA in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland. Dr Helfont has published articles on Iraq and political Islam in the Middle East Journal, Orbis, The New Republic and The Jewish Review of Books, among others. Benjamin Isakhan is Associate Professor of Politics and Policy Studies and Founding Director of POLIS, a research network for Political Science and International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. He is also Adjunct Senior Research Associate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics, Discourse (2012) and the editor of six books including, most recently, The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (2016). Ben’s current research includes a three-year funded project entitled ‘Measuring Heritage Destruction in Iraq and Syria’. Hilary Falb Kalisman received her PhD from the History Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Her research focuses on the connections between state-sponsored education and political culture throughout the Middle East. Her dissertation used a collective biography of local x

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educators in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan/Jordan in order to shed light on national affiliation, schooling and governance during early state formation. She is the author of ‘Pedagogical paradox: education and internalization in the Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq)’, Kufa Review, and ‘Iraqi archival materials in Israel’, in the TAARII Newsletter. Marc Lemieux is an electoral officer with the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Central African Republic (MINUSCA), and is a practitioner of democratic development, elections and federalism. He served as a regional coordinator for the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) in Iraq. Marc is the author of ‘Iraq’s 2009 provincial and regional elections: the dynamics of political identity since 2005’ in the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, and ‘Iraq’s conflicted transition to democracy: analyzing elections in a violent society’ in Elections in Dangerous Places (2011). Shamiran Mako is a lecturer at the International Affairs Program at Northeastern University. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include ‘Iraq: who’s to blame?’ in the World Affairs Journal, ‘International response to Bahrain’s Arab Spring’ in e-International Relations and ‘Cultural genocide and key international instruments: framing the indigenous experience’ in the International Journal of Minority and Group Rights. Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Assistant Professor of Middle East History at California State University, San Marcos. His research primarily deals with the history of Iraq and violent conflict in the Middle East. His current book project is a history of the Iran–Iraq War from the perspective of the Iraqi military and the security and intelligence forces, focusing on the projection of violence against Iranian forces and Iraq’s Kurds. He is the co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008). He obtained his DPhil in 2004 in Modern History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Hilla Peled-Shapira is a researcher of modern Arabic literature at Bar-Ilan University. She focuses on opposition intellectuals and their relationship with authorities as reflected in their writings. Her publications include ‘Religion and politics: on the motif of blindness in ‘Abd al-Malik Nuri’s “Rih al-janub” and Ga’ib Tu’mah Farman’s “Ammi abburni”’ in the Journal xi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of Arabic Literature, ‘From imperial capital to dungeon: the construction of the image of the city in the works of the Kurdish-Iraqi poet Buland alḤaydarī’ in Oriente Moderno, and ‘From conventional to personal, or: what happened to metaphor under the influence of ideology – the case of Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman’ in the Journal of Semitic Studies. Peter Sluglett is Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of the nineteenthand twentieth-century Middle East, with a regional focus on Iraq and Bilad al-Sham. He is co-author, with Marion Farouk-Sluglett, of Iraq since 1958: from Revol-ution to Dictatorship (3rd edn, 2001), Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (I.B.Tauris, 2007) and co-editor of Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (2014) and An Atlas of Islamic History (2014), with cartographer Andrew Currie. From 2012–13 he was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Gareth Stansfield is the Al-Qasimi Chair of Arab Gulf Studies, Professor of Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter and the Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He is also Director of Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). His work on the Kurdistan region of Iraq commenced in 1996 while working as a political advisor to the Kurdish leadership until 2001. Among his many publications are Iraqi Kurdistan: Political Development and Emergent Democracy (2003), Iraq: People, History, Politics (2007) and Islamic State, the Kurds and the Future of Iraq (2016). Jordi Tejel holds a PhD in History (Fribourg University) and Sociology (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris). He is currently a research professor at the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) where he leads a research project on minority conflicts in the Middle East. His most recent books include Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (2009) and Writing the History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (edited with Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco and Hamit Bozarslan, 2012).

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Preface: Whither Iraq? Peter Sluglett

These are, and have long been, terrible times for the people of Iraq. Even though the project of overthrowing the regime in 2003 was not entirely without merit, the criminally incompetent manner of its execution, and its persistently negative aftermath, have combined to create one of the greatest man-made disasters of modern times. The US invasion shattered a not especially well-functioning state, but its ‘planners’ at the Department of Defense seem not to have given any thought as to how to go about replacing what would be destroyed, as well as being entirely oblivious to the sheer magnitude of the task involved. The invasion smashed the fragile structures of Iraqi society, and created a degree of havoc whose indirect ill effects have been multiplied ad infinitum. The ‘Islamic State’ is simply the latest, if perhaps the most notorious, of the disasters that have beset Iraq. Beginning in 1958 with the coup that overthrew the monarchy, Iraq witnessed several more military coups. The coup against Abd al-Karim Qasim in February 1963, and more permanently the coup that installed the Ba‘thist regime, which began in July 1968 and continued under Saddam Husayn’s takeover in 1979, initiated two devastating wars in 1980 and 1990 and lasted until its removal by the US invasion in 2003. The invasion of Kuwait triggered a 13-year period of sanctions (1990–2003), which destroyed Iraq’s middle class, its social, educational and 1

STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ

welfare systems and most of whatever cohesion it might have had as a state. It will hardly come as a surprise for the general reader to learn that there have been few periods since Iraq’s creation when the state, or more accurately the regime running the state, had any degree of popular legitimacy.1 In short, the state’s pervasive lack of accountability has meant that it has always tended to act as the enforcer of the interests of the regime and its closest supporters rather than harmonising popular aspirations or responding to them. Of course, as long as the going was good, there were carrots as well as sticks, with a kind of social contract in place involving the provision of employment, goods and services in exchange for popular acquiescence. But after the price of oil halved in 19852 the regime became less and less able to deliver, and was obliged to rely increasingly on fear and coercion to impose its will. In any case, its support always rested on a fairly narrow base.3 In spite of this, it is only quite recently, in fact as a result of the apparently inexorable challenge posed by the ‘Islamic State’, that there has been any serious talk of the Iraqi state breaking up, or losing territory to another political entity. In spite of the occasional temptation to do so, the autonomous government in Iraqi Kurdistan has not formally taken such a step since its formation at the end of 1991, and recent developments in Turkish politics may well have made taking such a step increasingly unlikely. Kurdistan’s landlocked situation means that secession from Iraq is only possible if good relations between Turkey and Iran and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) can be assured well into the future. If they cannot, the Iraqi Kurds are probably better off staying with Iraq, keeping Baghdad at arm’s length as they have succeeded in doing for most of the past 25 years. However, the Kurdish Regional Government remains financially dependent on Baghdad. Clearly, Iraq’s immediate past can only tell us a limited amount about its present. Of the 12 contributions to this book, five are concerned with the mandate and monarchy, four with the period between 1958 and 2003 and three with the period since 2003. Iraq began as an uneasy fusion between its Ottoman past and its colonial present and there were profound continuities from the earlier period. British officials, anxious to stress Britain’s altruism, tended to invoke and exaggerate ‘Ottoman tyranny’ and Iraq’s ‘backwardness’ to justify the British invasion and occupation. In fact, the 2

PREFACE

Ottoman state as it manifested itself in Iraq in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not much more underdeveloped than, say, Mexico or Portugal at the time, and it had made considerable strides towards land settlement, sedentarisation, securing public order,4 the introduction of various forms of communications, including river transport, railways and the telegraph and the adoption of an empire-wide code of civil law, the mecelle, in 1877. Again, contrary to much current received wisdom, ‘Iraq’  – certainly the area south of Mosul to the Gulf  – had functioned as a more or less unified political entity under the authority of whoever controlled Baghdad for most of the period between the ‘Abbasids and World War I, so the notion that it is an ‘artificial colonial creation’ is rather misleading.5 That is, although the modern state was a colonial creation de jure, Baghdad had ruled much of what were then the wilaya-s of Basra and Mosul for most of the four centuries before 1920. Another equally hardy myth is the notion that Iraq was somehow forged on the anvil of Sunni-Shi‘a sectarian hatred, which had been in existence ‘from time immemorial’. Of course, that Iraqi Arabs come from these two sects, that the Shi‘as greatly outnumber the Sunnis and that the Sunnis were in charge from Ottoman times to 2003 is undeniable. But most contemporary discord between the sects, however much it may have been exacerbated by the US invasion, is traceable to a much more recent past, to the mid- to late 1970s. At that time the Sunni minority attempted to embed its own legitimacy as the ‘natural rulers’ of Iraq in notions of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, which generally favoured an interpretation of the Arab past in which Kurds and Arab Shi‘as and their extensive traditions played a minimal, indeed essentially negative, role.6 Coincidentally, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and Iran’s rise as a ‘Shi‘a superpower’ in the 1980s, during the Iran/Iraq war, egged the process on, but there is little evidence of Sunni/Shi‘a tensions before that. More generally, Sunni and Shi‘a communities have coexisted peaceably enough in situations where they have lived alongside each other (in Iraq before the mid-1970s, in Lebanon before the Iranian revolution, in Pakistan until the late 1980s). Counter-examples can probably be found, but sustained Sunni/Shi‘a conflict has been relatively rare until the last quarter of the twentieth century; it cannot be viewed as having been inherent in, let alone characteristic of, Islamic society until then.7 3

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In addition, the symbolic bulldozing by Islamic State of the boundary posts between Syria and Iraq was not, as far as I am aware, a response to deeply, widely or long felt popular sentiment. All formal attempts at Arab unification in the past have failed, and while regimes have often been held in contempt, it is only recently that borders have suffered a similar fate. Some years ago Eberhard Kienle suggested that one of the main reasons for Syria’s espousal of these schemes was ‘the damage done to its interests by the borders imposed by foreign powers after World War I, which impeded trade and separated families or properties’ – important points, but rather mundane stuff in comparison with the lofty visions of the ‘Islamic State’.8 Some older thinkers did have more umma-like aspirations, but, for example, although Mawdudi’s party was called Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan, his vision of an Islamic State was largely confined to Pakistan: the idea of a universal Islamic state was at most a ‘distant utopia’.9 Similarly, while the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood may have aspired to a universal Islamic state stretching from Spain to Indonesia, Hasan al-Banna’s successors ended up staying within the framework of the nation state – as exemplified by the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian branches of the organisation.10 In their introduction, the editors make an eloquent plea for more ‘politics [or history] from below’, a sentiment with which it is hard to disagree. Here I find myself revisiting the same problem to which Marion FaroukSluglett and I drew attention more than two decades ago, that of access.11 On a humdrum level, it is difficult to think of a single Arab country (perhaps only Jordan, Kuwait or Morocco) where it might now be possible to carry out sociological or anthropological ‘fieldwork’: Iraq is evidently no exception. All the contributors to a roundtable on recent research on Iraq in the autumn 2015 Arab Studies Journal12 share the same lament, the sheer difficulty of gaining access to sources, both documentary and human. So many researchers hoped that the fall of the regime would lead to an opening up of possible research avenues and collaboration with Iraqi colleagues, but this has not happened, and seems unlikely to happen. This is not to downplay the high quality of much recent research, but even now, 12 years after the invasion, most of it has had, perforce, to be conducted outside Iraq. In conclusion, there are a few green shoots of hope in what seems to be a catalogue of horrors, disasters and human tragedies. Benjamin Isakhan has written elsewhere about the valiant efforts of Iraq’s trade unions to prevent 4

PREFACE

the wholesale privatisation of Iraqi oil,13 and indeed – aided, of course, by the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ and the precipitous fall in the price of oil – this ‘reform’ has so far not taken place. On the other hand, thousands of Iraqis took to the streets in August 2015, in separate cities and on separate occasions, protesting against corruption, profiteering and shortages. Although they were quoting from the stock hymnal of the nationalist repertoire, the demonstrators called for the creation of a secular state instead of a confessional state, protested against artificially created divisions between Sunnis and Shi‘as and unequivocally condemned sectarian political parties.14 Clearly, the departure of Nouri al-Maliki and the appointment of Haider al-Abadi have been steps in the right direction – and Iraqis have widely recognised this to be the case – but it will take a great deal of time and dedication for al-Abadi to turn the country round to the extent that it needs, and it is by no means clear that he will be able to overcome his government’s inadequacy, lack of sense of purpose and endemic corruption. One can only applaud his efforts and hope that those demonstrating for a secular state can also stick bravely to their guns. As the authors suggest, it is only by such means that Iraq may acquire ‘a sense of collective identity towards the notion of a cohesive, peaceful and prosperous future’. After all the years of desolation and war, it is certainly high time.

Notes 1. More or less rigged national elections had taken place until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. After that, there were no more elections (apart from various referenda in support of the presidency) until 30 January 2005, which, although held under less than ideal circumstances, were the first free elections in the country’s history. Hence ‘opposition’ was always illegal and underground: Peter Sluglett, ‘Political opposition in the Islamic tradition: a historical perspective’, in Holger Albrecht (ed.), Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010), pp. 52–71. 2. The price of oil did not return to pre-1985 levels until 2005. The population grew from 15.3 million in 1985 to approximately 22.7 million in 2005. 3. Charles Tripp estimated in 2000 that Saddam Husayn’s patronage networks involved at most half a million individuals (out of a total of some 20 million), including their dependents, so between 2 and 3 per cent of the entire population: Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 4. ‘And so you see, we have crossed the Syrian desert [without an escort, from Damascus to Hit in Iraq, PS] as easily as if it had been the Sultan’s high road, and we have made many friends and seen the ruins we went out to see’: Gertrude Bell, letter to her father, 23 February 1911, Gertrude Bell Archive, University of Newcastle. 5. Reidar Visser, ‘Historical myths of a divided Iraq’, Survival 50/2 (2008), pp. 96–106. 6. Eric Davis, Memories of State:  Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 7. The wars between the Ottomans and Safavids (intermittently between 1510 and 1639) had political and territorial rather than religious roots. Much the same could be said of the war between Iran and Iraq between 1980 and 1988, in which most of the fighting took place between Iranian Shi‘a conscripts on one side and Iraqi Shi‘a conscripts on the other. 8. Eberhard Kienle points out that successive Syrian regimes proposed at least 9 such schemes between 1949 and 1980:  Eberhard Kienle, ‘Arab unity schemes revisited: interest, identity, and policy in Syria and Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 27/1 (1995), pp. 53–71. Elsewhere in the Arab world, Malik Mufti aptly described the various attempts to unite Kuwait and Iraq as a ‘timeworn tactic of Iraqi leaders in trouble’; Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 9. Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 10. It is more than likely that many Islamist organisations now in existence seek to (re)create some form of a more or less universal Islamic state or caliphate: the argument being made here is that such aspirations have only come into existence in their current form during the last decade. 11. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, ‘The historiography of modern Iraq’, American Historical Review 96/5 (1991), pp. 1408–21. 12. Arab Studies Journal 23/I (Fall 2015), pp. 236–65. 13. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Doing democracy in difficult times: oil unions and the Maliki government’, in Benjamin Isakhan (ed.), The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 125–37. 14. Joseph Daher, ‘Iraq, winds of hope  – massive popular demonstrations against corruption and ruling sectarian parties’, Europe Solidaire sans Frontières, 18 August 2015. Available at http://www.essf.lautre.net/2011/spip. php?article35695 (accessed 19 August 2015).

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Introduction: State–Society Relations in Iraq: Negotiating a Contested Historiography Benjamin Isakhan and Fadi Dawood At no time since the founding of the modern nation of Iraq in 1921 has the country faced a greater set of deep-seated and intractable challenges to its fragile state–society relations. In June 2014 the Sunni Arab terrorist network known in English as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) conducted a series of highly coordinated and brazen attacks across parts of central and northern Iraq. They captured several key cities, such as Mosul and Tikrit, effectively expanding their existing strongholds to control vast swathes of territory across both western Iraq and northern Syria. With their roots in earlier iterations of Islamist terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS had effectively harnessed the chaos that engulfed neighbouring Syria following its descent into civil war from 2011. Later that same year the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq after nearly a decade of military occupation presented ISIS with a unique opportunity to expand on a scale that they could not have imagined only 12 months earlier. They knew all too well that the US-led intervention to oust the Ba‘thist regime in 2003 had not led to the promised democracy and stability, but to a series of bitterly fought disputes over resources and power. It had unleashed a deadly sectarian conflict, particularly between the Sunni Arab minority who had dominated the Iraqi state prior to 2003 and the Shi‘a Arab majority who had ascended to unprecedented degrees of political power in the 7

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wake of regime change. ISIS therefore sought to exploit the ever-widening gap between the Sunni Arab parts of Iraqi society and the new Iraqi state. Although much has already been written about the extraordinary military capabilities of ISIS, their ideological fervour and their cruel fundamentalist vision,1 little attention has been paid to the extent to which they pose a distinct challenge to state–society relations in Iraq. Indeed, the rise of ISIS has brought to the fore some very old and very troubling questions about the complex and contested history of the Iraqi state. As just one example, ISIS have brought back into focus the very legitimacy of the nearly century-old borders imposed by the British and the French in the clandestine Sykes– Picot Agreement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Within days of their advance across Iraq, ISIS had in fact bulldozed parts of this border and declared their new ‘Islamic State’. In doing so, ISIS exposed the weakness of Baghdad, not only in its capacity to maintain its borders but also to enforce security across Iraqi territory. Consequently, the central government in Baghdad effectively controls less territory today than at any time since the ink dried on the Sykes–Picot agreement; the state of Iraq has devolved into three distinct zones. The first is the ‘Islamic State’, which is governed by the strictest interpretations of Salafist doctrines and Sharia law. While there is much derision amongst the international community concerning its declaration to be either ‘Islamic’ or a ‘state’, it is important to note that ISIS have established the semblance of a functioning state – albeit a highly volatile, inconsistent and nightmarishly cruel one. Across the territories they control, ISIS have replaced many of the civic and administrative structures of the Iraqi state with their own institutions, a vast tyrannical jihadist bureaucracy that combines strict Islamist ideals with the provision of minimal public services. ISIS have fixed power lines, installed sewerage systems and painted pavements, operated public transport services and collected rubbish, provided jobs and security and set up makeshift schools and hospitals.2 They have also imposed the rule of law, establishing kangaroo Sharia law courts in which ‘infidels’ (non-Muslims, those who refused to publicly endorse their ideology and even those accused of petty crimes like drinking alcohol) have been tried and, in many cases, executed. What is more, ISIS have the means to enforce the rule of law and dominate the use of coercion and punishment across their territories. 8

INTRODUCTION

The second is Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds of the former Ottoman Empire did not warrant a mention in the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Kurds have been trying to create and independent enclave ever since. Although they have controlled parts of northern Iraq for centuries, when Saddam brutally cracked down on the Kurds following their uprising after the Gulf War of 1991, the international community enforced a no-fly zone that allowed the Kurds to manage a semi-autonomous region constituted by Iraq’s three northernmost governorates.3 With the rapid expansion of ISIS in 2014, the Kurds took the opportunity to seize the ‘disputed territories’, including the strategic city of Kirkuk, and to threaten once again to secede from the rest of the country.4 Given the strength and loyalty of the Kurdish armed forces (peshmerga) and the passion of the Kurdish people for their own state, it is very difficult to imagine that the Kurds would take a step backwards on their long journey towards independence. This leaves Baghdad in effective control of roughly one-third of the country, stretching south to Basra, across the Shi‘a Arab heartland. While the ISIS advance has galvanised the Shi‘a Arabs and brought a renewed sense of solidarity, which is perhaps best captured by the sudden rousing of various Shi‘a Arab militias into a relatively united force who surged north to stanch the ISIS advance, the community remains deeply divided along complex political and religious lines. Further, the Shi‘a Arab militias pose a sequence of critical challenges to the integrity of the Iraqi state for several reasons. Firstly, they are avowedly sectarian in nature and have been responsible for enacting deadly retribution on Sunni Arab civilian populations;5 secondly, they operate largely independent of Baghdad’s control and owe their allegiance not to the state but to their respective religio-political hierarchies; and thirdly many are armed, trained and in some cases directly commanded by the Iranian regime. It is a mistake, however, to see the current conflict in Iraq as purely constituted by the three grinding tectonic plates of ISIS, Kurdistan and the Shi‘a Arab militias. Iraqi identity is, and always has been, a complex and contested issue with both the often discussed separation into the three dominant groups of ‘Arab Sunnis’, ‘Kurds’ and ‘Shi‘a Arabs’6 and the imposition of a collective ‘Iraqi’ identity by the state (such as under the Ba‘th) being widely resisted in Iraq. Instead, Iraq is home to a complex array of divergent, intersecting and often competing notions of identity and myriad 9

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social strata. Firstly, identity politics in Iraq is convoluted by the vast number of religious and ethnic divides that do not neatly dissect the nation into a series of mutually exclusive groups. Beyond the three most prominent groups mentioned above, Iraq has historically been home to a number of smaller ‘racial and religious minorities … [including] Turkomans, Persians, Assyrians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Jews, Yazidis, Sabeans, and others’.7 Secondly, within and across each of these broad categories are more intricate differences, with many sectors of Iraqi society capable of being further broken down by political allegiances, tribal affiliations, class hierarchies, gender differences and urban versus rural parochialisms. What is evident here is that Iraq is a complex ideological landscape, home to a large swathe of highly politicised efforts by a number of competing or overlapping factions to assert notions of a historically legitimate ‘identity’. The complexity of Iraq’s identity politics is also highlighted by the deadly ISIS advance and everything it has unleashed. Most of the myriad Iraqi people have nothing invested in the power struggles of marauding zealots, opportunistic separatists or rampaging militiamen. It would be an understatement to say that since the ISIS onslaught, Iraq has witnessed a profound fracturing of its delicate cultural mosaic and that the most vulnerable citizens – the small ethno-religious minorities and especially the women and children – have suffered immensely. Christian, Assyrian and Yazidi populations have been particularly targeted in a number of gruesome campaigns. In the Sinjar Mountains, Yazidis have been slaughtered en masse, with thousands more fleeing for their lives. In Mosul, Christians were given stark ultimatums to flee, convert or face their death. Women, including girls as young as 14, have been forced into marriage, gang raped or sold as sex slaves. Boys as young as 12, if not systematically executed, have been kidnapped, indoctrinated, armed and trained to serve as child soldiers. This says nothing of the thousands who have fled their homes to become internally displaced or to huddle in refugee camps across borders. It also says nothing of Iraqis who have endured unimaginable suffering and who continue to live in fear for their lives from the next suicide bomber, coalition airstrike, fake police checkpoint or sectarian vendetta. There is simply no way to fully comprehend all of this – the deadly ISIS advance, the Kurdish seizure of the disputed territories, the rousing of 10

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INTRODUCTION

Shi‘a Arab militias and the unspeakable humanitarian tragedies unfolding across Iraq – without coming to terms with the complex history of state– society relations in this deeply fragmented nation. However, most pundits have framed recent events in terms of their immediate past and without a rich contextual backdrop to their evolution. They have pointed to the failings of the al-Maliki government and his rising authoritarianism, to the violent sectarianism that has gripped Iraq, particularly since the civil war of 2006–8, to the failures of the Iraqi political elite to author a new and cohesive national narrative after the ousting of the Ba‘thist regime, to the catastrophic mistakes made by the US-led occupation following the 2003 intervention and further back to the legacy of Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. It is undeniable that these issues have all played a significant role in shaping contemporary Iraqi politics, and while some are therefore discussed in this volume, this book moves beyond facile short-sighted analysis to place the complex and contested nature of state–society relations in Iraq today within a broader and deeper historical analysis than is typically offered. The central arguments and the key contributions of this book are twofold. Firstly, the book aims to situate Iraq’s current crisis within its broader contextual background, arguing that a unique set of historical events has converged to provide the catalyst that triggered the current chaos. While acknowledging that not every constituent element of Iraqi society can be captured in a single volume,8 the argument here is that no assessment of the situation brought on by ISIS and no attempt to resolve it is complete without an appreciation of the longue durée of Iraq’s complex state–society relations. Secondly, this book argues that the rise of ISIS is just the most recent signal that traditional methods for dissecting the complexity of Iraqi politics have mostly been premised on outdated notions, leading to reductive insights and simplistic visions. Beyond the overwhelming emphasis on failed occupations, cruel megalomaniacal tyrants and bloodthirsty ethnoreligious factions are an Iraqi people who have routinely agitated against the state, advocated for legitimate and accountable government and called for inter-communal harmony. As demonstrated by the contributors to this volume, the Iraqi people can no longer be considered the docile objects of history, passive spectators to their own dominion. Instead the book articulates a wide variety of multifaceted and intersecting narratives that together 11

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demonstrate the complexity of state–society relations in Iraq, its nuances and diversity, its advances and setbacks, its challenges and achievements. It is in the aggregate of these stories that we find the seeds of a future Iraq in which the relationship between the Iraqi state and the broader society moves beyond traditional patterns of oppression and cruelty, of dangerous rhetoric and divisive politics, towards a sustained and genuine engagement with the complex matrix of socio-cultural relations that constitute the broader citizen body.

Framing State and Society in Iraq The political historiography of state–society relations in Iraq has typically occurred along three fundamental lines of scholarly enquiry. The first is what might be termed a structuralist state-centric paradigm that emphasises the formal relationship between the state and its official institutions and other traditional sites of power (tribes, etc.) or key oppositional political parties. In this work, power is held by certain elites who dictate their respective vision to society. This model dates back to the work of Thomas Hobbes who emphasised the need for an all-powerful and allencompassing state – a leviathan – to govern the otherwise bellicose and chaotic nature of human society.9 In this new state, Hobbes believed that people ought to cede their personal freedoms to the state, creating a direct relationship between the isolated individual and their government; there would be no need for ‘society’ which would only breed factionalism, parochialism and dissent. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century such notions were challenged by prominent scholars such as Karl Marx and Max Weber. For Marx, disparities in socio-economic class created protagonists of political change; the state was a ‘superstructure’ designed to entrench and further the political and economic interests of the dominant class.10 Providing a more nuanced view of state–society relations, Max Weber defined the state according to his oft-cited minimalist criterion: ‘the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory’.11 However, Weber was also sensitive to constituent layers of political power in a given society (social stratification) that included Marx’s class divisions but also emphasised traditional 12

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modes of power such as patrimonialism. In a patrimonial political system, authority is stretched upwards from the traditional and pre-modern familial and tribal hierarchies to the state, whose ruler is severely constrained by such power relations. Despite their emphasis on class divisions or patrimonial networks, Marx and Weber shared with Hobbes the assumption that the state was the primary agent of political power. This went on to have a profound influence on studies of state–society relations from the middle of the twentieth century. For example, ‘modernisation theories’ tended to overstate the relationship between the centre (the state) and periphery (society), believing that the policies set in the capital had a direct and linear impact on shaping the broader society.12 Other state-centric approaches emphasised the role of key state institutions, arguing that the state not only governed, it also shaped people’s social interactions  – society  – via the complex and intersecting apparatuses of law, bureaucracy, executive power and the (perceived) legitimate use of violence to maintain order.13 Until recently, the bulk of scholarly studies of Middle East politics have (explicitly or implicitly) adopted one or another of the frameworks outlined above.14 The same can be said of studies of Iraq. Perhaps most notably, Kanan Makiya’s towering indictment of state violence, coercion, torture and oppression under the Ba‘thist regime led him to conclude that Saddam’s Iraq had ‘aimed at the manufacture of a Hobbesian world’.15 For Makiya the Ba‘thist leviathan had completely annihilated political opposition and civil society and had instead built a ‘Republic of Fear’ that no one dared to criticise. Providing more nuanced critiques, several seminal studies of Iraq’s political history have been conducted along Weberian and Marxist lines. The first is the work of the famous Iraqi political sociologist Ali al-Wardi, whose seven-volume Aspects of the Social History of Modern Iraq analysed the contours of Iraqi political culture. Al-Wardi argued that Iraq’s modernisation had been superficial and that the nation was a fragmented social order riven by a fundamental schism between the state (and the civilised values of modernity) and traditional patrimonial sites of power (such as tribal and familial hierarchies).16 Along similar lines, Hanna Batatu conducted an overtly ‘classic sociological class analysis – an analysis that draws essentially upon the insights of Karl Marx and Max Weber’17 to examine the relationship between the state and the various 13

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opposition movements that emerged among the political classes, especially the communists. Two further examples are worth mentioning here. The first is Charles Tripp’s Weberian analysis of the power and influence of patrimonial networks (patrons, tribes) on the Iraqi state.18 The second is Adeed Dawisha’s more explicit adoption of Weber’s approach to his study of governance, national identity and democracy through the course of the twentieth century.19 While each of the above provide rich insights into the machinations of political power in Iraq, their utilisation of Weberian and Marxist approaches led to an understanding of the Iraqi state as little more than a mechanism for the few to enforce their vision on the passive many. In such accounts, power is contested between the state and other key actors and institutions – tribes, political opposition movements – with little mention of how the broader Iraqi society received, engaged, interpreted or resisted this process. The second key approach to state–society relations is what we can refer to as a post-structuralist approach in which power is conceived as nonlinear, a complex and ongoing negotiation between state and society. The origins of this model can be found in the works of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who saw the state as much more than an instrument via which the bourgeoisie engaged in physical or ideological coercion. For Gramsci, the state was embroiled in an ongoing, overlapping and untidy process of maintaining its authority (or ‘hegemony’) over the complex matrix of political, social, religious and cultural sites of power that constitute the wider citizen body.20 Key to the political negotiations that constitute hegemony was the role of intellectuals, with Gramsci differentiating between the ‘traditional’ intellectual who is bound to the ideas of the ruling class and the ‘organic’ intellectual who promotes counter-hegemonic discourses. However, it was Michel Foucault who developed further the notion that competing discourses constitute state–society relations. Throughout his work, Foucault downplayed the role of the state, its formal institutions and dominant ideologies as agents of political change to emphasise instead the power held and exerted by the myriad decentralised networks that make up a given society.21 In a lecture delivered in 1976, Foucault put this more clearly by contending that: In a society such as ours there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body,

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INTRODUCTION and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.22

The post-structuralist approach to state–society relations ushered in detailed critiques of the notion that the Middle Eastern state was an allpowerful leviathan or that it was a product of purely class struggles or patrimonial networks. Indeed one does not have to subscribe to all of Nazih Ayubi’s conclusions to see that his central argument was that behind the façade of state power across the Middle East lay a complex discursive struggle for hegemony.23 This process of discursive negotiation between the state and society has been central to several studies of Iraq. Focusing on the top-down manipulation of discourse by the Ba‘th, such studies demonstrate the extreme lengths the regime went to in order to enforce the regime’s hegemony. By manipulating discourses as diverse as state media and Mesopotamian folklore the Ba‘th sought to inculcate a shared sense of national identity, to indoctrinate the people towards patriotism and to gain the consent of the people and maintain power.24 Eric Davis broadens this analysis to document the complex and dynamic interplay between such state-sponsored discourses and the role played by various ‘organic’ intellectuals in offering competing memories. In his cogent analysis, Davis juxtaposes the Ba‘thist sponsored ‘Project for the Writing of History’, in which Iraqi writers, historians, academics and artists were commandeered by the state to help re-engineer the past for Ba‘thist purposes, with the proliferation of counter-hegemonic discourses – oppositional literature and intellectual production – during the Ba‘thist period. A similar focus on such counter-hegemonic discourses and oppositional narratives can be found in other analyses of various scholarly works, media, literature and poetry which offered alternative, even hybridised, versions of what it meant to be an Iraqi.25 While all of these studies emphasise the political significance of these counter-cultural trends in Iraq, it must be remembered that such discourses typically circulated in elite intellectual and literary circles and it remains unclear as to the extent to which such discourses either played a role in shaping the Iraqi state or penetrated the fabric of the broader society. 15

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This points to a third model of Iraqi political historiography, which has sought to emphasise the dynamic interplay between the state and the broader society. This model has its origins in the work of Joel Migdal, who proposed a ‘state-in-society’ approach in which the state is viewed not as above or separate from society but rather as just one entity within society that structures social relations in a given polity. The state is therefore often in direct competition with other socio-political entities – the social class or family, the tribe or village, the ethnic or religious group – that enforce rules and structure behaviour.26 Migdal’s approach therefore deviates from the structuralist, state-centric approach and from the post-structuralist discursive approach to emphasise the need to look back and forth between the top reaches of the state and local society. One must see how the organisation of society, even in remote areas, may dictate the character and capabilities of politics at the centre, as well as how the state (often in unintended ways) changes society.27

Migdal’s state-in-society approach has been adopted to varying degrees by several seminal studies of Middle East politics.28 The same can be said for various studies of modern Iraqi political history. Both Peter Sluglett and Toby Dodge point out that although there are several key reasons the British failed in their attempt to build a modern state structure in Iraq, principal among them is their failure to understand the complex and delicate nature of Iraqi society.29 The British sought to impose state institutions on a society that they did not understand and did not consult with, and they artificially empowered a small and carefully chosen band of Sunni Arab urban elites to inherit this new state and rule on behalf of the Empire. ‘Thus in mandatory Iraq’, as Peter Sluglett concludes, ‘social forces were not greatly engaged with the state … the state was not firmly rooted in society and was thus “up for grabs” to the highest or, more relevantly, the most militarily effective, bidder’.30 Several recent studies of the Ba‘thist period have followed along similar lines. In her nuanced work, Dina Khoury demonstrates how, under the Ba‘th, the practice and discourse of war became a way of governing that not only transformed the state (its policies and key institutions) but also shaped the contours of Iraqi society, regulating ‘the inner emotional self of 16

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INTRODUCTION

the Iraqi individuals as he or she experienced the war’.31 Along similar lines, Achim Rohde demonstrates the complex ‘ways in which state and society interacted on the ground, namely: in public discourse, as regards the regime’s gender policies, social norms, concepts of masculinity and femininity as well as the arts’.32 While Rohde employs a Gramscian/Foucauldian approach to his analysis, he does so in order to capture the perspectives of ordinary Iraqis rather than the discourses circulated among the elite intellectual classes.33 Contrary to the notion that Ba‘thist Iraq was dominated by an all-powerful leviathan, that power rested in class divisions or patrimonial networks, or that the only contrast to Ba‘thist hegemony was intellectual discourse, studies such as Khoury’s and Rohde’s reveal the degree of political bargaining that occurs between any state and the broader society. Finally, it is worth noting that several recent studies of Iraqi state–society relations have called for a historiography ‘from below’, an embrace of plural memories, low-brow culture and grassroots politics. In his study, Fanar Haddad analysed the rise of sectarianism as a dominant discourse following the 1991 uprisings and the 2003 intervention. His focus on seemingly mundane symbolism and banal cultural products (such as certain YouTube videos and militia songs) demonstrated how sectarianism rapidly transformed into a form of mass group identity where the symbolism of the ‘sect’ clashed with the symbolism of the new Iraqi ‘state’.34 Similarly, Sargon Donabed’s historiography of the Assyrians of Iraq illuminates the complex relationship between the state, its varying regimes and its segments by highlighting the overlapping boundaries of identity and political dissidence at the grassroots level and by juxtaposing the Assyrian experience alongside that of Iraq’s dominant communities, namely the Arabs and Kurds.35 In terms of grassroots activism, Benjamin Isakhan has documented the rise of various spontaneous civil society networks, unions, protest movements and media outlets that sprung up in the wake of the 2003 intervention to fill the gap between the promise of a new and democratic state and the realities of occupation, violence, and the steady return to authoritarianism under the government of al-Maliki.36 Such a focus on ‘politics from below’ is also central to a recent work entitled Writing the Modern History of Iraq.37 Here, the editors argue that Iraqi historiography ought to move beyond the analysis of formal sites of state politics and its institutions, as well as traditional sites of power (tribal, sectarian, ethnic) 17

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to develop a fuller appreciation of the multitude of actors and layers of politics that have shaped Iraqi history.

Chapter Summaries This edited collection therefore builds on such works to examine the shifting and complex nature of Iraqi state–society relations over time. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on as yet unstudied primary sources and offering fresh empirical insights, the contributors explore the complex nature of Iraqi state–society relations via an investigation into the dynamic interplay between four interconnected sites of power: the Iraqi state and its formal institutions and networks of power (such as the military, the state education system, the electoral commission); formal socioreligious institutions and networks that are typically independent from the state but wield significant power over their constituents (such as religious institutions, ethno-nationalist movements, oppositional political parties, tribal hierarchies); civil society movements and grassroots activists who can be both formal institutions or informal networks who seek to fill the void between the state and society by agitating for change and advocating on behalf of their constituents, sometimes on an ad hoc basis (such as student movements, protestors, cultural clubs); and the discourses espoused by individuals and groups who do not necessarily organise, meet or advocate in any physical sense but who create counter-hegemonic narratives (such as historians, novelists, intellectuals). By closely examining the relationship between the constituent layers and multiple dynamics that have shaped, and continue to shape, Iraq state–society relations, this volume provides unique insights into the political and social movements that influenced Iraqi politics from its inception as a modern nation state through to the period that has followed the US-led intervention of 2003. More broadly, this book examines the roots of the most significant problems facing the contemporary Iraqi state – sectarianism, authoritarianism, violent Islamism, ethnic separatism – and argues that no effort to overcome these deep-seated and intractable problems will succeed without an understanding of their past. In Part I of the volume (‘Colonial Rule and the Making of Modern Iraq’), the contributors address the founding of the modern state of Iraq. 18

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INTRODUCTION

This began with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the British decision to unite the three previously autonomous vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul into the modern state of Iraq in 1921, installing the Hashemite king, Faysal I. In the process, the British colonial officials not only imposed borders, they also installed their own political institutions in a system of direct colonial rule over what had been a confederation of tribes, ethnic and religious enclaves, and local power holders. Rather than growing organically out of society (indeed Iraqi society was not consulted in the process), the new Iraq was hastily given the trappings of European statehood: a centralised administration with a national parliament pliant to British interests; a national military; important state-wide institutions such as that of education; a functioning economy integrated into the international market; an independent judiciary and legal system; as well as the important symbols of statehood such as a flag, national anthem and so on. Despite, or perhaps because of, such top-down state building, the Iraqi body politic remained distant, diffuse and decentralised without a stake in the process or a united purpose or direction. Naturally, sites of resistance emerged from the very beginning. In his chapter Fadi Dawood focuses on the Assyrian and Armenian Christians in the Ba‘qubah refugee camp that was established at the end of World War I. He documents how the British fear of Assyrian–Armenian violence led them to deliberately invest in traditional tribal and religious leaders. In doing so, the British inadvertently created a power vacuum that was promptly filled by new political movements that offered a counternarrative to the British-backed religious and tribal heads and advocated violent revenge against the communities that had attacked them.38 Along similar lines, Arbella Bet-Shlimon’s chapter examines how further fragmentations in Iraqi society were caused by mass urbanisation, industrialisation and changing demographics (such as a sudden mass of urban poor) in Iraqi cities such as Baghdad and Kirkuk. While Baghdad forged ahead as the political and mercantile capital with its symbolic projections of a proud and prosperous Arab state, the multi-ethnic people of Kirkuk resisted the British created state and the authority of the Sunni Arab political elite of Baghdad. Other resistance took the form of specific critiques of the newly imposed state institutions. For her part, Hilary Falb Kalisman focuses on 19

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the Iraqi education system and documents the fact that many Iraqis were infuriated by its poor quality, claiming that the British had deliberately created a system that would provide just enough education to transform them into servants of empire, but not enough to create a class of educated Iraqis who could eventually govern the state independent of their colonial overlords. When Iraqis took over the education system the quality gradually improved, fuelling a virulent civil society that, not surprisingly, endorsed various anti-imperialist ideologies and called for independence from British hegemony. The problem, however, was that such anti-British sentiment was promptly quashed by another of Iraq’s newly created institutions, the military. In his chapter, Ibrahim Al-Marashi demonstrates how, well before the rise of the Ba‘th in 1968, the Iraqi military under the Hashemite monarchy had become both a key symbol of Iraqi nationalism and strength while at the same time being a Sunni Arab dominated instrument of statesanctioned exclusion deployed to coerce religious and ethnic minorities, tribal groups or political parties into forced acquiescence. Resistance nonetheless persisted. As Hilla Peled-Shapira documents in her chapter, the rapid improvement in Iraq’s education system had also spawned seminal Iraqi authors such as Shakir Khusbak and Ghaib Tuma Farman. Such authors developed an alternative narrative to that promulgated by the Iraqi state, exposing its contradictions, persecutions and violence with a particular focus on the 1952 Intifada, in which the Iraqi Communist Party and other left-leaning opposition groups staged mass protests before being violently suppressed by the state. The suppression of such political opposition movements would ultimately spell the end of the Hashemite monarchy. A plethora of different independence movements sprung up across the Middle East after World War II seeking to end European influence. Among the most prominent of these political movements in Iraq was the Arab Ba‘th Socialist Party, which had especially wide appeal in some intellectual circles and among the rank and file of Iraq’s military. In July 1958 the Ba‘th and other key political movements had gathered enough momentum to storm Baghdad in a violent coup that saw all but one member of the royal family murdered. The period following the 1958 revolution is covered in Part II of this volume (‘Republican Iraq: State–Society Relations under Authoritarian Rule’). Despite its bloody birth, under the leadership of Brigadier General 20

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INTRODUCTION

Abd al-Karim Qasim, the Republican period began as an epoch of promise, witnessing a flourishing of political parties, professional associations, labour movements and intellectual groups who fervently debated the political events and ideologies of their time. However, as Jordi Tejel demonstrates in his cogent chapter for this volume, Qasim’s relationship with Iraqi civil society gradually deteriorated. For example, when Qasim reacted to the student protests of December 1962 by arresting hundreds of students and lecturers, he effectively eroded his own support base and presaged the collapse of his regime. A few months later, in February 1963, the Ba‘th seized power in another bloody coup in which Qasim and hundreds of his supporters were executed. While the Ba‘th held power briefly in 1963, it was not until they staged another violent coup in 1968 that they managed to take the reins of the state. From the earliest days of their rule, but especially from the ascendency of Saddam Husayn in 1979, the Ba‘th developed their own potent cocktail of extreme violence and oppression mixed with more subtle forms of co-optation and indoctrination, a savvy propaganda machine designed to coerce people into patriotism. One such example is documented by Amatzia Baram’s contribution to this volume, in which he demonstrates how the Ba‘th commandeered intellectual discourse by encouraging Marxist intellectuals to publish. This gave credibility to their claim of being a secular and revolutionary political party and legitimated them in the eyes of certain members of Iraq’s educated elite. Beyond cleverly manipulating intellectual discourse, the Ba‘th also deployed their mixture of brutal suppression and subtle co-optation in their relationship with many of Iraq’s significant ethno-religious factions. In this volume two distinct examples are documented. In the first, Samuel Helfont demonstrates how the Ba‘th went to great lengths to try to infiltrate the powerful Shi‘a religious seminary (hawza) in Najaf. Ba‘thist records indicate that the regime coerced a number of religious students and senior scholars to work for the state by spying on their brethren. The rewards for such cooperation were high and included being granted freedoms and privileges denied other Shi‘a Arabs. This enabled the Ba‘th to crush any resistance from within the Shi‘a Arab religious establishment via their vast network of loyalists and spies inside the hawza. The second example of the Ba‘th’s complex relations with ethno-religious groups is that of the 21

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Assyrian Christians – taken up here by Alda Benjamen and Sargon George Donabed. The authors begin by noting that in the early 1970s the Assyrians and several other groups (such as the Kurds) were formally accorded significant rights such as the ability to teach in their own languages. However, despite such early and official overtures to the Assyrians, it was not long before they felt the heavy hand of the Ba‘thist state in their everyday lives. As just one example, when rural tribal Assyrians became involved in Kurdish rebellions against the Ba‘thist state, the Ba‘th destroyed many Assyrian villages, forcibly removed populations and bulldozed farms and churches. Part III of this book (‘Communal Strife and Re-emergent Authoritarianism in Post-2003 Iraq’) moves forward to analyse the period that followed the US-led intervention in 2003. After toppling the Ba‘thist regime, the coalition undertook an ambitious and unprecedented statebuilding project in which they would attempt to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free market capitalism and constituted by a citizen body free to live in peace and prosperity. To build this new Iraqi state, the US began by uprooting the old one via a wholesale de-Ba‘thification of Iraq. As cruel as the highest echelons of the Ba‘thist state had been, ousting those who served it was to have a series of immediate and devastating consequences:  it marginalised the ruling Sunni Arab minority; it forced thousands into unemployment and poverty; it prevented experienced bureaucratic and administrative personnel from helping to stabilise Iraq; and it brought about the disbanding of every tier of the Iraqi army, which in turn created an immediate upsurge in violence.39 From the ashes of the Ba‘thist state, the coalition authorities worked closely with a handful of carefully selected Iraqi elites, most of whom had been in exile for decades, to devise an entirely new Iraqi state. Driven by a top-down model of state building, they set about revitalising Iraq’s judiciary, investing millions in reforming various arms of Iraq’s sprawling bureaucracy and created various public oversight mechanisms that, in theory, would prevent the abuse of power.40 In their chapter, Marc Lemieux and Shamiran Mako analyse the cornerstone of the US-led state-building plan, the three provincial and three national elections that have occurred since 2005. Lemieux and Mako point out that the failures of Iraq’s democratisation was caused by a mixture of complex variables: ethno-religious political 22

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INTRODUCTION

parties born of the struggle against the Ba‘thist state, the ill-conceived and ham-fisted coalition approach to top-down state building and the failures of the Iraqi political elite to accept institutional reforms and unite behind a narrative that spoke to a united and prosperous future for Iraq. Principal among such causes of democratic failure, however, is that at every stage in the process both the Iraqi political elite and the occupational authorities failed to engage the broader Iraqi society in managing the transition from dictatorship to democracy. It is little wonder that cruel visions soon emerged to fill the vacuum between the state and society. Between 2006 and 2008 Iraq rapidly descended into a dark and unprecedented period of violence, dominated by the sectarian civil war fought between the Sunni and Shi‘a Arabs. Although things were much more peaceful in the Kurdish north, the two key political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), sought to utilise their influence over Baghdad not only to press for increasing degrees of autonomy, but also to try to bring the oil-rich but ethnically diverse province of Kirkuk under their jurisdiction. Although the Kurds are discussed several times throughout this book, Gareth Stansfield’s chapter is the only one dedicated exclusively to this important sector of Iraqi society. Stansfield’s chapter primarily concerns the emergence of the Kurdish autonomous zone after the Gulf War of 1991 and the fact that since then, and especially after the intervention of 2003, the Kurdish Region has emerged as a bastion of relative peace and freedom.41 Although there have been many criticisms levelled at Kurdish politics ever since 1991 including the domination of the two main parties, allegations of nepotism and corruption and occasional crackdowns on dissenters and protestors, Stansfield also points to positive developments in Kurdish state society relations, including the rise and prominence of the Gorran (‘Change’) political party from 2009. However, Baghdad did not follow the positive political developments of the north. Indeed, one key legacy of the US effort to bring democracy to Iraq has been that many elements within Iraq’s Shi‘a Arab political elite have viewed democracy through the lens of cynical majoritarianism, manipulating it to catapult themselves to power. This has had a further legacy, enabling the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to utilise his incumbency to maintain the veneer of democracy while becoming 23

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increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian. Al-Maliki deployed a host of different strategies towards these ends: violent crackdowns on Iraqi civil society; blatant sectarian rhetoric; the creation of a shadow state loyal to himself; the concentration of military and political power in his own hands; and the routine intimidation and undermining of Iraq’s key state institutions and mechanisms of public oversight including the judiciary, the electoral commission and those responsible for investigating corruption.42 In his chapter, Benjamin Isakhan traces the impact of al-Maliki’s autocratic approach on Iraq’s delicate state–society relations with a focus on the period following the US withdrawal at the end of 2011. He documents the long list of grievances held by the Sunni Arab minority including their political marginalisation since 2003, the continuing de-Ba‘thification, mass unemployment, insufficient infrastructure and public services, the arrest and detention of thousands of Sunnis without trial, the overly harsh treatment of female prisoners and – most dramatically – the issuing of arrest warrants and later death sentences for several high profile Sunni politicians. Isakhan demonstrates how the failure of al-Maliki’s government to address such grievances led to mass social unrest in Sunni Arab parts of Iraq. When al-Maliki reacted by violently suppressing legitimate protests against his regime, he further antagonised the Sunni Arabs and thereby created the political and security vacuum that was to be exploited by ISIS. Together, the chapters presented in this volume trace the complex nature of state–society relations in Iraq and the crucial role successive periods of Iraq’s political history played in shaping both the state and society. In terms of colonial Iraq, the focus on issues of societal fragmentation, exclusionary state building, the emergence of a culture of dissent and its frequent quashing by the state demonstrate how early Iraqi state formation sowed the seeds of both violent dictatorship and the myriad ways in which Iraqi society learned to resist state cruelty. In terms of Republican Iraq, the chapters collected here not only demonstrate the tyrannical nature of state–society relations under the Ba‘th but also demonstrate the complex ways in which Iraqi’s of many different backgrounds subverted state doctrine. The legacy of state–society relations under such a brutal dictatorship clearly had dramatic consequences after the toppling of the regime in 2003 in terms of ethnic separatism, violent sectarianism and a steady return to authoritarian forms of power 24

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INTRODUCTION

under the government of al-Maliki. The contributions concentrating on post-2003 Iraq demonstrate such consequences but also importantly point to the ways in which the failures of US-led top-down state building coupled with a power-hungry elite further fractured Iraq. While the Kurdish north has forged ahead on its road to independence, the failures of Baghdad to engage the Sunni Arab population have led to the rise of ISIS and its profound and violent challenge to state–society relations in Iraq. The chapters therefore demonstrate that foreign intervention, war, authoritarian rule and ethno-sectarian conflict make Iraq an unfortunate case study through which to interrogate the complex matrix of consent, negotiation, resistance and counter-discourse that constitute state–society relations. The fresh empirical insights offered in each of the chapters means that the volume does not simply trace important historical developments in Iraq, it also makes a substantive contribution to the literature on Iraqi politics and, more broadly, to the study of state–society relations. The key lesson is that the deep fracturing of Iraq’s complex state–society relations cannot be repaired by military force, by imposed institutions, by centralising power or by suppressing the web of socio-political forces that shape society, but by inculcating a sense of collective identity towards the notion of a cohesive, peaceful and prosperous future – despite all the challenges and differences.

Notes 1. Benjamin Isakhan (ed.), The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS:  The State of Terror (New  York:  HarperCollins, 2015); Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS:  Inside the Army of Terror (New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 2015). 2. Ben Hubbard, ‘Offering services, ISIS digs in deeper in seized territories’, New York Times, 16 June 2015. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/ 17/world/middleeast/offering-services-isis-ensconces-itself-in-seized-territories.html?_r=0 (accessed 17 June 2015). 3. Gareth R. Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan:  Political Development and Emergent Democracy (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 4. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘The Iraqi Kurdish response to the “Islamic State”: political leverage in times of crisis’, in Gareth R. Stansfield (ed.), The Kurdish Question Revisited: Essays on the Transformation of the Kurdish Situation in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2016).

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 5 . Kareem Fahim, ‘Government allies are said to have slaughtered dozens of Sunnis in Iraq’, New York Times, 29 January 2015. Available at http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/middleeast/government-allies-aresaid-to-have-killed-dozens-of-sunnis-in-iraq.html?_r=0 (accessed 17 June 2015). 6. Throughout this volume certain authors refer to the ‘Arab Sunnis’, ‘Kurds’ and ‘Shi‘a Arabs’ as if they are monolithic groups. The editors and the authors are sensitive to the many nuanced disputes and differences within each of these groups with several such difference discussed at length:  Sunni Arab tribesmen vs Islamists; the entrenched Kurdish political dynasties of the KDP and PUK vs the recent momentum of the Gorran movement; the Shi‘a Arabs of the hawza vs secular Shi‘a Arab student protestors in Baghdad. Nonetheless, the broader collective terms are sometimes used for the sake of brevity and to capture overarching political and historical movements and moments that were primarily driven by one distinct group. 7. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A  Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 13. 8. There are several key elements of Iraqi society that are unfortunately not captured in adequate detail in this volume. Foremost among these are the women of Iraq, who make up approximately half the population and, in addition to the trials and tribulations endured by male Iraqis, have faced their own gender-based challenges throughout Iraq’s complex history. In addition, the manifold factions that constitute Iraqi society are not covered equally. For example, while the Kurds (roughly 20 per cent of the Iraqi population) are mentioned many times throughout the volume, they are the primary focus of only one chapter. Conversely, the Assyrian Christians (whose already small numbers have dwindled substantially in recent years) are the primary focus of two chapters and mentioned in a few others. The reason for these absences and/or inconsistencies is twofold: firstly, the volume does not purport to cover every aspect of Iraqi state–society relations or to do so equally proportional to population; secondly, and more importantly, the volume focuses on critical and as yet under-explored elements of Iraqi state–society relations across the three time periods. 9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], Project Gutenberg, 2002. Available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm. 10. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843], ed. Joseph O’Malley, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1977). 11. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (eds), trans. Rodney Livingstone, The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), pp. 32–93, 33.

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INTRODUCTION 12. Cyril Edwin Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (New  York:  Harper and Row, 1966). 13. Peter B. Evans and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1968). 14. Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Mehran Kamrava, Democracy in the Balance: Culture and Society in the Middle East (New York: Seven Bridges, 1998). 15. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear:  The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 128. 16. Ali Al-Wardi, Aspects of the Social History of Modern Iraq, 7 vols (Baghdad: Matba’a al-Sha’b, 1969–76). 17. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 5. 18. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 5–6. 19. Adeed Dawisha, Iraq:  A  Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 2, 9. 20. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1929–35], ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (New York: International, 1971). 21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1979], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1991). 22. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:  Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 93. 23. Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 1995). 24. Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba‘thist Iraq, 1968–1989 (London: Macmillan, 1991); Ofra Bengio, Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 25. Muhsin Al-Musawi, Reading Iraq:  Culture and Power in Conflict (London:  I.B.Tauris, 2006); Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq:  Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 26. Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 27. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. xv. 28. Ali R. Abootalebi, Islam and Democracy: State-Society Relations in Developing Countries, 1980–1994 (New York: Garland, 2000); Ninette S. Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship (Routledge: London, 2002); Roger

27

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29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 3rd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq:  The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). Ibid., p. 215. Dina R. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 10–11. Achim Rohde, State-Society Relations in Ba’athist Iraq:  Facing Dictatorship (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 11. Ibid., pp. 14–16. Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Sargon Donabed, Forging a Forgotten History:  Iraq and the Assyrians in the 20th Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Benjamin Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics, Discourse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Jordi Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco and Hamit Bozarslan (eds), Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2012). Dawood Azami, ‘Refugees, warriors and minorities in Iraq:  the case of the Assyrians, 1920–1933’, unpublished PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2015. Sultan Barakat, ‘Post-Saddam Iraq: deconstructing a regime, reconstructing a nation’, Third World Quarterly 26/4 (2005), pp. 571–91; Richard O. Hatch, ‘A year of de-Ba‘thification in post-conflict Iraq: time for mid-course corrections and a long-term strategy’, Journal of Human Rights 4/1 (2005), pp. 103–12; Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Targeting the symbolic dimension of Ba‘thist Iraq: cultural destruction, historical memory and national identity’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4/3 (2011), pp. 257–81; Benjamin Isakhan, ‘The de-Ba‘thification of post-2003 Iraq:  purging the past for political power’, in Benjamin Isakhan (ed.), The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 21–35. Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan. Toby Dodge, Iraq: From War to New Authoritarianism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Shattering the Shi‘a: a Maliki political strategy in post-Saddam Iraq’, in The Legacy of Iraq, pp. 67–81.

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Part I

Colonial Rule and the Making of Modern Iraq

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1 The Ba‘qubah Refugee Camp, 1919–22: State–Society Relations in Occupied Iraq Fadi Dawood

In addition to the thousands of individuals killed during the Ottoman genocide of 1915 against the Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks, thousands were also displaced from their ‘traditional’ homelands in a crumbling Ottoman Empire.1 This resulted in an influx of refugees who found themselves in search of asylum. The Armenians found themselves seeking admission to what by 1920 had become the nascent Syrian and Iraqi states. Aleppo became home of the largest group of genocide survivors who had escaped the Ottoman Empire for Syria. Baghdad and Ba‘qubah in Iraq received thousands of Armenian refugees in the period following World War I.2 Multiple rescue efforts were organised in order to help the refugee populations in both Iraq and Syria. The League of Nations, British and French governments and American missionary societies, were all involved in helping with relief efforts directed at the Armenian and Assyrian communities. According to Keith Watenpaugh in his seminal work, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, the efforts to help the refugee populations ushered a regime of humanitarianism that became a corner stone of foreign policy towards the Middle East. With the exception of a few organisations that sought to help both Muslims and non-Muslims in the period following 31

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World War I, the vast majority of efforts were focused on non-Muslim populations of the Middle East.3 In Iraq, both Assyrian and Armenian refugees found themselves the target of a humanitarian effort that sought to help the displaced populations as they migrated south towards a number of cities in Iraq, such as Mosul and Baghdad. Established Armenian communities in these cities were better able to integrate the arrivals into the larger social and political milieu of the modern Iraqi state. Assyrians, who found themselves without a power base in Iraq, were the focus of relief efforts by the aforementioned groups.4 Contextualised into the larger refugee relief regime of the post-World War I period in the Middle East, the events surrounding the resettlement of the Assyrian community, and the time they spent in Iraq as a refugee population, left a deep impression upon those who lived in Ba‘qubah during the years immediately following World War I. This chapter will examine life in the Ba‘qubah refugee camp from 1919 to 1922, in order to analyse state– society relations and changes that the Assyrian community experienced while many of the community members lived in the camp. The British military officials who were responsible for the administration of the camp were interested in the control and management of the refugee population, particularly with a view to containing any possibility of unrest. To demonstrate this, the first section of this chapter will briefly describe the geographical setting, physical space and facilities inside the camp. It will then examine the interaction of colonial officials with the Assyrian population and argue that the British management of the camp contributed to social and political changes that continued to influence the community long after the vast majority of the refugees were resettled outside of the camp in 1929. Colonial policies also contributed to the emergence of political fissures that split the Assyrian leadership inside the camp, as well as the community as a whole, as is indicated by the emergence of the Assyrian National Committee under the leadership of General Agha Petros. This chapter will illustrate the deep divisions created by the British colonial authority in Iraq between the various ethnic and religious communities even prior to the creation of the modern Iraqi state. These divisions eventually solidified the distance between the Iraqi state and the Assyrian population in the period of the British Mandate (1922–32). 32

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THE BA‘QUBAH REFUGEE CAMP, 1919–22

Organisation and Colonial Discipline In 1919–20 about 40,000 Assyrians and Armenians arrived for settlement at the Ba‘qubah refugee camp. The camp was located about 40 km north of Baghdad, in the small town of Ba‘qubah. The Assyrian refugee population at the time was divided into two major groups: those from the Hakkari Mountains and those from the Urmia region. The Assyrians of the Hakkari were divided into Ashirats and Rayats, and totalled 14,327 individuals. The term Ashirat denotes the semi-independent tribes of the Hakkari Mountains who, until World War I, had lived in villages with very little interference from the local Kurdish chiefs or the Ottoman government. Rayats were the Assyrian tribes that lived in Kurdish-controlled territory and had to pay a tax to the Kurdish chiefs who managed the villages on behalf of the Ottoman government. A total of 10,252 Urmia Assyrians settled in the refugee camp but they did not adhere to the tribal divisions of the Hakkari Mountains; they identified with their villages and towns of origin in Iran.5 The Ba‘qubah refugee camp first became operational in late November 1918, and the vast majority of the refugees arrived in the early months of 1919. Both British and League of Nations officials were mainly concerned with the Assyrian population in Ba‘qubah as part of the force that had helped the British and French armies to defeat the Ottoman Empire during World War I.6 The first wave of refugees to settle in the camp were those who had reached Iraq as part of the Assyrian military contingent that fought with the Russian, and later British, forces in the Hakkari Mountains and the western regions of Iran. In the camp, Hakkari Assyrians continued to be divided according to their ‘traditional tribal affiliation’ under the leadership of General Agha Petros, the commanding officer of the Assyrian forces during World War I. Petros and his troops came to Ba‘qubah from the Hamadan province in Iran, where the Assyrian forces had fought with British officers during the summer and autumn of 1918.7 Originally named the ‘Jeloo’ refugee camp by British officials at the conclusion of World War I, the name of the camp was changed to Ba‘qubah in the early months of 1919. Russian and Iranian troops had referred to the Assyrian forces as ‘Jeloo’ during the war, using the name of one of the Assyrian tribes. British colonial officials adopted that name to describe all arriving Assyrian refugees, but they soon realised that only about 700 of 33

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them belonged to the Jeloo tribe. As a result, the officials changed the name of the camp to Ba‘qubah, after the name of the neighbouring Iraqi town. The British military administration of Iraq established the camp some 40 km north-east of Baghdad. Built around the left bank of the Diyala river, its private and public buildings were constructed with brick and mud – building materials that were easily obtainable from the area around the river. The area that surrounded the town of Ba‘qubah was very fertile, with plentiful fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Ba‘qubah was a quiet town that had little contact with the urban centre of Baghdad. Its inhabitants, who were largely affiliated with local tribes, used the Othmaniyeh canal, which fed the Diyala river, and the plains next to the canal, for the watering and grazing of sheep and other livestock. Ba‘qubah’s population relied heavily on the production of wool and dairy for their economic well-being. The British found this grazing area used by Ba‘qubah’s inhabitants to be the most suitable for the construction of the refugee camp. When they decided to occupy the area, they banned the local Arab population from using their ‘traditional’ pasture land, particularly around the Othmaniyeh canal.8 Depriving the local population of vital grazing grounds left them disgruntled with both the British and the Assyrian refugees. As a result, the population of the town became hostile, and from the early days after the establishment of the camp Bedouin tribal sheikhs organised regular attacks against the refugees. This hostility continued to threaten the population of the camp until at least 1927–8.9 The camp itself was divided into three sections:  A, B and C. Armenians were settled in Section A, the majority of the Assyrians from Hakkari and a small number of Armenians in Section B, and a mix of Assyrians from Urmia and a small number of Hakkari Assyrians in Section C.  Each of these sections was administered by a senior British officer who was in charge of keeping its residents within the confines of their respective area, and oversaw their welfare, cleanliness, and discipline. In order to enforce order and security inside the camp, each officer was assisted by five non-commissioned soldiers. By 1920 a total of 3,000 British and Indian troops were stationed in Ba‘qubah.10 The number of troops decreased rapidly following the summer of 1920, after the declaration of the mandate had forced the British administration to cut military expenditure.11 34

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THE BA‘QUBAH REFUGEE CAMP, 1919–22

Although effectively run as a military base, the camp was somewhat absurdly publicised by Iraq’s military authorities – and by the camp’s first commander, H.H. Austin  – as a ‘modern European city’ with hospitals, schools, sanitation facilities and playgrounds.12 In reality, it was a military enclosure where, as in other parts of the British Empire, the army was in charge of managing all aspects of the daily life of the native population.13 Military officials also limited the movement of the refugees outside the camp, with the result that they had little or no contact with outsiders. While the Assyrians were perceived as weak and in need of protection, they were also thought to be potentially disruptive and prone to infighting.14 Restricting the movement of Assyrians and banning members of the community from interacting with members of other groups both conformed with and contravened colonial practice. While the French in Algeria often used military enclosures to isolate troublesome populations, in colonial cities such as British Dar es Salaam Africans were encouraged to participate fully in the social and economic life of the urban community as part of an ideal European civilised urban space.15 In Ba‘qubah the Assyrians were expected to live in such a model urban space, but within the confines of a refugee camp, in isolation from the new civic order promoted by the British authorities in early Mandatory Iraq.16 In 1918, when the refugees began to arrive in Ba‘qubah, it was difficult to organise them in accordance with their ‘traditional’ tribal backgrounds, as the officials were keen to do. The Armenians were assigned to area A of the camp and the Assyrians, regardless of tribal affiliation, were settled in areas B and C. The refugees arrived with thousands of domestic animals, including ponies, mules, cattle, donkeys, camels and sheep,17 which presented a very serious health hazard because they were unable to graze in the pastures around the camp. The camp became even more crowded after the closure of a smaller refugee camp that housed about 1,000 people in Beled Ruz (about 48 km east of the village) as a result of the friction with local residents.18 In the autumn of 1919 colonial officials initiated a plan for the reorganisation of the refugee camp along tribal lines, in order to enforce stricter surveillance and to maintain public security. As noted by Stephen Legg in the case of British India, colonial governments often experimented with the regulation and segregation of populations in the name of political and 35

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social safety.19 The reorganisation of Ba‘qubah placed Assyrian tribal leaders in close contact with their followers, helping to reproduce the political structures that had organised them in the Hakkari Mountains. From the beginning, Assyrians had been kept separate from the Armenian population, as the British believed that the antagonism between the two groups posed a security threat. In fact, social and cultural differences seem to have hindered the establishment of a positive living relationship between the two groups. British officials frequently reported that the men of the Assyrian Tiyari tribe were prone to bullying a small group of Armenians housed in section B. The Tiyari men, who were notorious for their military prowess, conducted occasional attacks on the Armenian population in an effort to dominate the public spaces of the camp.20 The Assyrians of the Hakkari Ashirats were the largest population to settle in Ba‘qubah at the conclusion of World War I. They arrived in the camp with their tribal and religious leaders, who functioned as the intermediaries between the population and the colonial officials. In fact, during the first few months at Ba‘qubah the Assyrians kept their ‘traditional’ social and political structures intact. Their tribal chiefs continued to carry out administrative duties, and retained considerable influence over the daily lives of the refugee population. Mar Polos Shimun, the patriarch of the Nestorian Church, who was also a resident of the camp, continued to function as the political and religious head of the Assyrian tribal council – an organisation that incorporated all of the community’s tribal leaders. Under the watchful eye of the military regime, this council was kept operational in the period from 1919 to 1922.21 The British saw its members as the ‘natural leaders’ of the community and as a useful instrument for the control of the population – an attitude typical of colonial situation in India.22 The model was famously transplanted to the rural areas of colonial Iraq, which were perceived as places where tribes and tribal leaders had historically dominated the political landscape, and as pre-modern settings ‘untainted by the negative and destabilising effects of capitalism’.23 As a result, tribal chiefs were employed to control and manage rural districts on behalf of the colonial government. While the sheikhs were expected to rule in accordance with British political expectations, the Assyrian leaders, including Mar Polos Shimun, maintained an independent sphere of action while in the camp. The Assyrian leadership held regular weekly meetings in the tent that the British 36

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had set up for the purpose. The ‘tribal council’, as it became known among British officials, was allowed to administer community affairs with little interference from British officials, partly as a result of the lack of resources available to the colonial administration in the early days of the occupation. Echoing its attitude to tribal sheikhs elsewhere in Iraq, the British administration saw the authority of the Assyrians as legitimate and noble, unaffected and uncorrupted by the political ideals taking hold of the urban populations in Iraq.24 Mar Eshai Shimun officiated at weekly religious services, as did the leaders of the Armenian community. The Assyrians were also allowed to participate in religious ceremonies and social activities that they had traditionally conducted in their villages. This allowed the community to continue to function according to what colonial officials believed to be their ‘traditional’ communal life.25 The Assyrians from the Urmia region held a singular place in the British colonial imagination. They were thought of as more civilised, due to their long history of contact with American and European missionary societies. A number of them who had been educated in the United States and spoke English were employed as translators and administrators inside the camp. But the British administration was concerned with their future in Iraq, as they believed that they would be unable to defend themselves in the event of attacks from the Arab population.26 Indicative of this attitude is the fact that the Assyrians of Urmia were never classified as ‘warriors’ by the colonial administration, unlike their Hakkari counterparts.27 Those with professional training became the first to leave the refugee camp during late 1920 and early 1921, recruited by the colonial administration. For instance, during the 1920s some Urmian Assyrians involved in the medical profession found employment in Iraq’s Ministry of Health.28 In fact, medical services were classified as the most important priority inside Ba‘qubah, given their role in controlling the spread of disease and infections. Upon arrival, every refugee had to be examined and then ‘disinfected’. Special quarantine areas were set up in which every refugee had to go through a battery of medical tests to become eligible for residency. The use of modern medicine to govern and control native populations was a widespread colonial practice, as has been described by Megan Vaughan in the case of Africa.29 While in the cases analysed by Vaughan, colonial 37

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officials had years to penetrate African society and reshape ideas of sexuality, gender relations and ideas surrounding illness and cleanliness, in Ba‘qubah colonial military officials developed medical standards based on what they believed would help civilise Assyrians. They therefore set standards for cleanliness and access to healthcare, which was part of a larger project of managing the population within the camp. Three hospitals were constructed inside three large military tents for the treatment of refugees arriving in Ba‘qubah with various illnesses they had contracted while trying to flee their homes during World War I. In particular, injured soldiers and pregnant women were given priority at camp hospitals. Others were cared for in their tents, away from the centralised medical section where the camp hospital was constructed.30 Each section of the camp had its own self-contained canteen for food preparation. The area was organised and managed by British officers, whose main concern was to ensure that the food was being prepared in a clean and sanitary environment. Members of the community cooked their food collectively, and they were also expected to manage the rations that were distributed to them on a weekly basis. The management of food preparation and consumption offered a microcosm of the larger effort on the part of colonial officers to control and structure the daily lives of the refugees. By forcing the community to prepare and eat their food collectively, the administration of the camp was able to monitor individual and groups more closely.31

The Emergence of a New Leadership The political and social changes sparked by the arrival of the community at Ba‘qubah posed a number of challenges to the authority of Mar Shimun and his family. Although British colonial officials were generally uninterested in intercommunal struggles, they romanticised the role of the ‘traditional’ tribal leader. As a result, they tended to support tribal leaders, believing that they could be trusted. Yet, in parallel with this belief, the British military officials who controlled the refugee camp saw the Assyrians as warriors ready to work in what was then the early creation of the Iraq Levies Force. This tension in colonial perceptions became a wedge issue that fuelled the political conflict within the Assyrian community in Ba‘qubah in the years from 1920 to 1922. 38

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Until May 1920 Mar Polos Shimun continued to occupy the leading political and religious role among the Assyrians. Colonial officials relied on Mar Shimun and his council when they made decisions affecting the Iraqi community as a whole. Prior to their arrival in Iraq, the Assyrians, as a transnational ethnic group, had lived under a variety of political and social conditions. Those from Urmia had lived as subjects of the Iranian state, while those from the Hakkari Mountains had generally lived under the political authority of the Assyrian tribal leadership or under the direct rule of Kurdish tribes. Upon the arrival of the community in Ba‘qubah, the British saw fit to centralise the leadership of the community under Mar Shimun, believing that this would make it easier to control the camp through the authority of the tribal leadership  – comprising the council and the religious leader at its head. As Mar Shimun took up residence in Ba‘qubah, a tent was constructed specifically for meetings of the Assyrian leadership. The leadership of the community was also housed in a special ‘aristocratic’ section of the camp.32 Almost immediately after the arrival of the Assyrians in Ba‘qubah British military officials allowed the community to administer its internal affairs separately from the general administration of the camp. Mar Shimun and his tribal council were allowed to apply the legal practices of the millet system, which remained in force in Iraq. Through the authority of Mar Shimun, the tribal council held considerable powers to give legal advice, punish members of the community, issue legal verdicts and, most importantly, to deploy the legal code of the Church of the East to administer the internal affairs of the Assyrians in Iraq.33 The sudden death of Mar Shimun Palos in May 1920, and the ascendency of Eshai – a 12-year-old boy – to the role of Mar Shimun exposed hazardous political fault-lines. Mar Shimun Palos had resided with his subjects in Ba‘qubah, along with his tribal council, and had kept a close watch over the various political and social problems that emerged as a result of the population’s displacement and resettlement. The newly installed Mar Eshai Shimun and his family moved to Mosul in order to allow the child to receive an education. At Mosul, Mar Shimun was disconnected from the problems facing the refugees at Ba‘qubah. As a result, the aunt of the young patriarch Surma Mar Shimun, who was in London promoting the cause of Assyrian independence in the autumn 39

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of 1921, returned to Ba‘qubah in the hope of preserving her family’s role among the refugees.34 Even after the return of Surma to the camp, it was Mar Khananishu, the metropolitan bishop of the Nestorian Church, who played the leading religious and legal role in Ba‘qubah, thus bypassing the authority of the young patriarch. He assembled tribal leaders for the purpose of holding court and issuing legal judgements. The absence of the young patriarch encouraged both tribal and religious leaders to claim their right to act as representatives of the refugee population. After she arrived in Ba‘qubah , Surma took a leading role in protecting the political position of Mar Shimun, and ordered that the tribal council meet in her tent on a weekly basis.35 Surma and her supporters  – who included the members of the Assyrian tribal council  – started to use poetry to promote the authority of the young Mar Shimun. A  poem written in 1921 by Shamasha Ephraim – a poet and deacon – commissioned by Surma herself, mentions her increasingly important role as the deputy of Mar Shimun: ‘Lady of the Holy House, Surma stands amongst us; Giver of high counsel to her brothers from a child.’36 Meanwhile, encouraged by the leadership change, a number of Assyrian military leaders belonging to tribes such as the Jeloo, Bazi and Tiyari organised themselves around General Agha Petros, the military leader who had led the Assyrians from Urmia to Iraq and who thus emerged as the chief political rival to Mar Shimun and his family. A member of the Baz tribe, Petros managed to win the trust of the British administration. Both Sir Anthony T.  Wilson  – the British civil commissioner in Baghdad until late 1920 – and H.H. Austin – the commander of the Ba‘qubah camp – became interested in the political opinions promoted by Petros and his followers. In the winter of 1920 Petros and his men were invited to a meeting with Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner in Baghdad, to discuss the fate of the Assyrian refugees, without including members of the tribal council. This invitation marked a shift away from the support that the British authorities had traditionally lent to Mar Shimun and his family. It also gave Petros the necessary legitimacy to promote his leadership aspirations among the Ba‘qubah refugees.37 The supporters of Agha Petros were Assyrian military and tribal leaders who had commanded Assyrian troops during World War I. They believed 40

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that they had earned the right to lead the community, arguing that because of the strong ties they had developed with the military administration in Ba‘qubah and the administration in Baghdad, they should be trusted with the political future of the community. In late 1919 they formally created the National Assyrian Committee, an organisation that countered the Assyrian tribal council gathered around Mar Shimun. The efforts of these individuals intensified in late 1920 and the early months of 1921, as the committee claimed responsibility for managing Assyrian affairs and sole authority to deal with the British administration. Surma Mar Shimun was forced to take her case to the Anglican Church in London in order to counter the claims of Agha Petros and his followers.38 Anglican Church officials hoped that Surma would be able to raise the profile of the community in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Prior to World War I  Anglican missionaries had been stationed in the Hakkari region, where they had established close political ties with the Mar Shimun family, believing that they would be able to spread Anglicanism in the Middle East through the Assyrian community. After World War I they continued to support Assyrian efforts to create an independent nation state in Hakkari. Upon arrival in London Surma met with various government and church leaders, the most prominent of whom were the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, the Bishop of Manchester, William Temple, and several members of the British parliament. They helped to organise a number of social gatherings and fundraising campaigns in order to raise money and awareness of the pitiful situation of the Assyrian refugee community in Iraq. Surma also asked for the removal of Agha Petros from the Ba‘qubah refugee camp. She argued that the community did not support his leadership and that he was acting for his personal benefit.39 Surma’s campaign against Petros accentuated the personal conflict between the two leaders and polarised opinion inside Ba‘qubah. The tension became so severe that the British administration did not want Surma to return to Iraq, fearing for the internal security of the refugee camp, by then on the verge of being torn apart by factionalism. In a letter written to Austin in 1921, Agha Petros called Surma his personal and political enemy.40 By the summer of 1921 a large number of Assyrian refugees at the camp had organised themselves under the leadership of General Agha Petros into a quasi-military organisation called the ‘Christian Army 41

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of Revenge’. Agha Petros and a number of military commanders, such as Malik Yaqo, and several Bazi, Tiyari and Jeloo leaders indicated to British colonial officials that they had already made plans to return to the Hakkari Mountains, and that they would do so even without the consent of British and Iranian officials. British military officers in Iraq saw the plan as wise and possibly offering the solution of a final settlement for Assyrians in Ba‘qubah. As a result, the British gave the Assyrians ammunition and mountain guns in 1920. The British believed that the weapons would expedite the return of the Assyrians to the Hakkari. But the plan had alarmed the British civil commissioner, Wilson, and his entourage in Baghdad. Wilson feared that possible military clashes between the Assyrian and Kurdish populations in the Hakkari would harm British interests in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq and what remained of the Ottoman Empire. As a result, a month after the Christian Army of Revenge had been established, Wilson issued an order to stop the Assyrians from leaving the refugee camp.41 Although they had initially encouraged Petros, the British administration had become increasingly suspicious of his motives, to the extent that in 1922 he was accused of having used excessive violence towards his troops during World War I.  His militaristic and violent approach to politics also became the target of fierce criticism as being likely to lead to clashes both inside and outside Ba‘qubah. Meanwhile, the supporters of Surma Mar Shimun started to send petitions to Baghdad demanding the dismissal of Petros as the representative of the Assyrian population at any future meeting with the colonial government.42 A third Assyrian political faction emerged during the turbulent months in late 1920 and early 1921 led by Malik Kambar of the Jeloo tribe. Kambar was a member of the French military forces in the Syrian Jazira region who had been employed as the leader of an Assyrian force that had been used to help pacify the region during the early years of the French military occupation. By 1921 Kambar and his men had gained control of Dayr al-Zur, Raqq, Abu-Kamal and Hassakah, having won a number of important battles. By then, Kambar claimed to be the rightful leader of the Assyrian population, in both Iraq and Syria.43 To promote his military efforts and political ambitions he hoped to enlist the support of the Ba‘qubah refugees. In 1922 42

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Kambar sent letters to the various Assyrian tribal leaders, the 12-year-old patriarch and Agha Petros asking for help in recruiting men for his military effort in Syria. He claimed that under his command the French would allow them to create an independent state for the Assyrians in the Jazira region.44 Kambar’s invitation found favour with Petros and his small military force. Petros hoped that joining Kambar in Syria would allow him to consolidate his leadership among the displaced Assyrian population of Iraq. But a few weeks after the invitation was accepted the British administration exiled Petros to India.45 Sam Parhad, who was a prominent Assyrian and community historian, and the biographer of Malik Kambar of Jeelu, believed that the events of the early 1920s – and particularly the British rejection of the proposals advanced by Agha Petros – were part of a larger scheme to repress and subjugate the Assyrian refugees in Iraq. According to Parhad, the British were afraid of a united Assyrian force and were keen to use Assyrian military contingents to advance their own interests in Iraq. According to him, this was confirmed by the later enrolment of the Assyrians in the Iraq Levies Force.46 The departure of Petros in late 1921 allowed Surma and her allies in Ba‘qubah to restore the authority of both the Mar Shimun family and the Assyrian tribal council. After his departure from India Petros continued to play an important role in organising and managing the Assyrian National Committee from exile in France. Geographic distance limited his influence in the camp, though his conflict with the Mar Shimun family continued, culminating in his proposal for the creation of an independent Assyrian state in northern Iraq in 1921. Surma seized her opportunity and began a campaign that promoted the virtues of the Assyrian tribal council, gaining increasing political support inside Ba‘qubah. She also argued that, with the support of politicians in London, she would be able to keep the Assyrian issue alive in Iraq and elsewhere.47 The various political struggles that characterised the political life of the Assyrians at Ba‘qubah continued to influence British decisions in relation to the community. The departure of Petros gave the colonial authorities an opportunity to re-establish the ‘traditional’ leadership as their main interlocutors. Petros’s exile also allowed Surma Mar Shimun to shift power back to her family. By 1921 it had become clear that the British administration was keen to use the Assyrian refugee population to advance its own political goals in Iraq. This eventually led to the 43

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creation of a military force employing the Assyrians as part of the Levies, Britain’s colonial army in Iraq.

Conclusion This chapter has examined British interactions with the Assyrian refugees in the Ba‘qubah camp between 1919 and 1922. Inside the camp, the colonial administration adopted policies that disciplined the population in order to avoid social and political unrest – particularly the feared Assyrian–Armenian violence. These policies conformed to ideas of colonial order that construed the camp as both a military enclosure and a modern urban environment, which was kept separate from the rest of the country. The need to control the Assyrian population led British officials to use the ‘traditional’ Assyrian political leaders as intermediaries, following colonial practice in Iraq and the remainder of the British Empire, deepening the control of Mar Shimun and his family over the population at Ba‘qubah. The refugees were also allowed, and in fact encouraged, to participate in the ‘traditional’ religious celebrations that they had brought with them from their villages in the Hakkari Mountains. British officers encouraged these types of celebration because they saw them as a valuable way to occupy the time of refugees, who had lost much of the structure and routine that they had been accustomed to in the Hakkari Mountains prior to their arrival in Iraq. The Assyrians themselves also enjoyed the celebrations, which allowed the community to maintain some of the social and political ‘traditions’ they had lost in the years following the genocide of 1915. The various colonial schemes for the control of the Assyrian population within the refugee camp led to a number of political struggles within the community for the remainder of the period of the British Mandate in Iraq. The granting of political authority to military leaders – for example, in planning the ‘Christian Revenge Army’ scheme and allowing Agha Petros to organise Assyrians independently from the ‘traditional’ political authority of the Assyrian population – created many schisms within the political and religious leaders residing in the camp, and continued to affect the relationship between the military and religious leadership throughout the period of the British mandate in Iraq. The schisms were 44

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formally solidified when the Assyrian National Committee, under the leadership of Agha Petros, was established inside the refugee camp. The committee drove a number of military leaders and militarised tribal chiefs to align themselves formally with Petros and with his demand for the formal establishment of a dominant military class within the Assyrian community, and this continued to be the case throughout the period of the British Mandate in Iraq. Inside the Ba‘qubah refugee camp, however, these internal struggles came to an end when British officials decided to exile Petros to India in late 1921. His exile from Iraq allowed Mar Shimun family to centralise political power, thus weakening other opponents who were eager to appoint non-religious individuals to lead the community. Quelling the debates over leadership inside the refugee camp allowed the British colonial establishment in Iraq finally to dissuade leaders of the community from demanding a return to their ‘traditional’ territory in the Hakkari; instead, they were settled in villages and settlements located in northern Iraq. The Ba‘qubah refugee camp set a note for state–society relations in Iraq. The establishment of the camp and isolation of Assyrian and Armenian minorities from the remainder of Iraqi society gave rise to nationalist sentiments within the Assyrian community. Assyrian nationalism became a tool that leaders of community utilised in order to distance members of the community from the emerging Iraqi state. The British also used Assyrian nationalism in order to recruit Assyrian men into the Iraq Levies Force, which further separated members of the community from the political and social mechanisms of the emerging Iraqi state in the period prior to independence in 1932. In 1922–3 British colonial officials made an effort to close the camp; in the process, and with help from the League of Nations, they managed to resettle the vast majority of Assyrian refugees living in the camp to villages located in northern Iraq, despite the protests that came from the leadership of the community who had hoped the British would allow the Assyrians to create a semi-independent region in northern Iraq for members of the various minority communities in the country. Because of the resistance from the Iraqi government in Baghdad, and fear that such a territory would harm the relationship between Assyrians and the remainder of the Iraqi 45

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population, the British rejected the plans originally put forward by Agha Petros.48 The proposal for independence and the political debates within the Assyrian community created conditions for the rise of nationalist discourses within the community. As a result the Assyrians remained suspicious of the Arab government in Baghdad, but they made it clear that if the British would continue to mediate between members of the community and the Iraqi government they would accept settlement in Iraq, despite their fears that politically they would be rejected by the regime in Baghdad and the remainder of the population in Iraq. The tensions between the Assyrians and Iraqi government continued to dominate the so called ‘minority question’ in Iraq for much of the British Mandate. Once the British departed and Iraq became independent, Assyrian fears became a reality when the community was attacked during the Simele massacre, which saw Iraqi troops attack Assyrian villages in August 1933.49 Iraqi government officials who sought to promote Arab nationalist discourses in the period from 1921, pointed to Assyrian isolation in the Ba‘qubah refugee camp and Iraq Levies Force barracks. Iraqi officials argued that the minority community was threatening the security and homogeneity of the Iraqi state, and as such individuals like Sati al-Husry argued that in order to protect themselves from British colonial polices and the threat of Assyrian forces that participated in crushing the Arab revolution of 1920, the Iraqi state must impose policies that limited the interaction of the community with members of the general Iraqi population. These policies led to a case of extreme breakdown in the state–society relations in Iraq, and the Assyrians were the first community to experience this particular problem. The policies implemented by the British in Ba‘qubah, and in particular the process of segregation, continued to be part of the general process of statebuilding that the remainder of the Iraqi population were governed by for the remainder of the British mandate. Essentially, camp policies became part of the general colonial statebuilding apparatus in Iraq. Members of the various communities were separated and urban and rural populations were governed separately under two sets of laws that saw the idea of the tribal sheikh romanticised by the British.50 This created a deep and lasting impact that continued to fragment Iraqi society for much of the British Mandate.51 46

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Notes 1. David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006). 2. Keith Watenpaugh, ‘Between communal survival and national aspiration: Armenian genocide refugees, the League of Nations, and the practice of interwar humanitarianism’, Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 5/2 (2014), pp. 159–61. 3. Keith Watenpaugh, Bread From Stones:  The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland, CA:  California University Press, 2015), pp. 12–13. 4. Nelida Fuccaro, The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (London: I.B.Tauris, 1999), pp. 90–5, 149–53. 5. Hermouz Aboona, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire (Amherst:  Cambria Press, 2008), pp. 10–15; The National Archives (TNA), FO 371/5127, ‘Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian refugees:  at present in camp at Ba’quba Mesopotamia: Appendix C Statistics’, p. 36. 6. League of Nations Archive, ‘British Mandate for Mesopotamia: report on Iraq administration October 1920–March 1922’, R.58. 30195, 17509, p. 102. 7. Herbert H. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp: An Account of Work on Behalf of the Persecuted Assyrian Christians (London:  Faith House Press, 1920), pp. 5–6. 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. The National Archives (TNA), AIR 20/7266, ‘Memorandum, Assyrians in the Ba’qubah Refugee Camp’, 11 August 1919, pp. 1–4. 10. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp, p. 25. 11. The National Archives (TNA), AIR 20/7266 ‘Memorandum, Office of the Civil Commissioner, building materials and housing’, pp. 18–20. 12. British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), IOR/L/PS/11/166, No. 36908, ‘Memorandum, Thanksgiving: an open letter by the secretary of the National Assyrian Committee of Ba’qubah’, 1924. 13. Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism:  Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 88. 14. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp, p. 5. 15. Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime, and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), pp. 25–7. 16. BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/11/166, No. 36908, ‘Memorandum, Thanksgiving’. 17. Ibid., p. 28. 18. Ronald Sempil Stafford, The Tragedy of the Assyrians (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), p.  28; BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/11/166, No. 36908, ‘Memorandum, Thanksgiving’.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 19. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, pp. 21–2. 20. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp, p. 111. 21. Ibid., p.  109; British Library, India Office Records, IOR/L/PS/11/169, H.L. Charge, Political Department, on special duty with refugees, Ba’quba, October 1919. 22. Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community:  Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1989), 61–7. 23. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 83. 24. Ibid., p. 84. 25. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp, pp. 11–28. 26. Ibid., pp. 109–10. 27. BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/11/169, H.L. Charge, Political Department. 28. Janice Boddy, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 29. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 30. BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/11/166, No. 36908, ‘Memorandum, Thanksgiving’. 31. Ibid.; The National Archives (TNA), AIR 20/7266, ‘Memorandum, tools and seed corn, and other farming materials’, 15 August 1919. 32. Jeff F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1992); Malik Loko Shlimon d’bit Badawi, Assyrian Struggle for National Survival in the 20th and 21st Centuries (self published, 2012), p. 125. 33. Ibid. 34. The National Archives (TNA), FO 371/5126, ‘Leadership of the Assyrian People, and Settlement of the Community’, November 1920, pp. 22–4. 35. TNA, FO 371/5127, ‘Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian Refugees’, pp. 31–2. 36. Shamasha Ephraim, Assyrian War Song, Assyrian Folk Poetry (Chicago, IL: Ashur Press, 1950), p. 12. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ninos Nerare, Agha Petros:  Sunharib al Qarin al Ishrin Ahdath wa wakai al masira al Ashuria fi al-harib al-alamia al ula (self published, 1996), p.  206; TNA, FO 371/5124, ‘The Assyrians in the refugee camp: political and social structures’, pp. 50–6. TNA, FO 371/5127, ‘Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian refugees’, pp. 50–6. 40. Nerare, Agha Petros, p. 206. 41. Ibid., p. 208.

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THE BA‘QUBAH REFUGEE CAMP, 1919–22 42. Shlimon Z. Gilliana, Assyrians in the Wilderness (Chicago, IL:  Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation, 2000), pp. 52–4; TNA, FO 371/5127, ‘Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian refugees’. 43. Sam Parhad, Beyond the Call of Duty: The Biography of Malik Kambar of Jeelu (Chicago, IL: Metropolitan Press, 1986), pp. 33–5. 44. Ibid. 45. Nerare, Agha Petros, pp. 192–4. 46. Parhad, Beyond the Call of Duty, pp. 36–8. 47. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England. 48. Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Communalism and the state in Iraq:  the Yazidi Kurds, c.1869–1940’, Middle Eastern Studies 35/2 (1999), pp. 1–26. 49. Ibid. 50. Dodge, Inventing Iraq. 51. Sami Zubaida, ‘The fragments imagine the nation: the case of Iraq’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 34/2 (2002), pp. 205–15.

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2 State–Society Relations in the Urban Spheres of Baghdad and Kirkuk, 1920–58 Arbella Bet-Shlimon

This chapter aims to understand the interactions of the nascent Iraqi state and civil society through the lens of Iraq’s cities – its urban milieus, social classes and changing spaces – during the colonial and semi-colonial periods under the Hashemite monarchy (1920–58). Like many other colonised and semi-colonised states, Iraq experienced rapid urbanisation in the twentieth century. During the British Mandate era (1921–32) and its aftermath, Iraq’s severely inequitable land-ownership laws, along with the global depression, caused many rural cultivators to lose their livelihood and move into cities for work. This trend, combined with the development of infrastructure and the extraction of oil, precipitated a high rate of ruralto-urban migration and created rapidly growing, increasingly industrialised conurbations in Iraq’s major cities, including Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and Kirkuk. The central question here is: how do histories of urban space, the built environment and histories with a local scope inform our understanding of state–society relations in Iraq? The most influential studies of state–society relations in monarchy-era Iraq do not explicitly consider urbanist frameworks in their approaches. In some cases this is because a focus on the politics of Iraq under the British Mandate necessitates a more sustained analysis of tribal dynamics, as British officials themselves located Iraq’s political centres of gravity in rural 50

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areas.1 Studies of state and society in Iraq also tend to primarily examine national identity formation, therefore focusing on trends in intellectual and popular discourse rather than spatial and geographical factors.2 A close consideration of local histories in Iraq illuminates the nature of the state under the monarchy and the ways that society mobilised politically. Within the Iraqi urban sphere, the new urban poor lived in makeshift dwellings and were physically segregated from the central urban fabric. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government collaborated with foreign experts and private industries – particularly the British-led Iraq Petroleum Company – to create a vision of modernity and prosperity that they linked fundamentally with civic identity. This vision, though powerful to both Iraqis and foreigners, was illusory; it existed in a dissonant state with the realities of socioeconomic inequality that undergirded urban political movements, particularly the activities of the Iraqi Communist Party. During the monarchy era, the urban unrest that occurred was primarily linked to methods of state control. This stands in contrast to the trend evident in some later periods in which violence became a method through which increasingly differentiated sectarian and/or ethnic groups asserted control over urban space. Importantly, when examining these phenomena, the Iraqi state itself must not be regarded as a unitary entity with the ability to extend power directly over society. The examples of state–society relations examined in this chapter demonstrate the leverage that Iraqi urban populations held through spatial practices such as strikes and protests, as well as the hybridity of the layered powers that might be called the ‘state’. This chapter will focus primarily on two cities:  Baghdad, the capital, and Kirkuk, the oil hub. Both of these cities experienced particularly robust growth, witnessed major development projects and served as the sites of influential political mobilisation. Understanding these processes requires an integrated analysis of the literatures on state and society in colonial and semi-colonial Iraq and Iraqi urbanism.

Urban History in Iraq: An Introduction The scholarly literature on modern Iraqi cities typically has not taken the interaction of state and society as its primary object of inquiry, unlike the literatures on cities in other parts of the Middle East.3 Nevertheless, these 51

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works provide a rich body of information on Iraqi urban geographies; architecture, urban development, and their underlying ideologies; urban and hinterland economies; and, in some cases, intercommunal conflict. There are precursors to the modern literature on this topic in the longstanding Islamicate genres of local histories and biographical dictionaries detailing the lives and achievements of the notables of major cities, particularly Baghdad and cities with prominent clerical establishments such as Najaf and Karbala. Noteworthy examples of this type of work include a multivolume history of Baghdad by Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi originally dating to the eleventh century, and an early modern history of Ottoman ministers of Baghdad by Rasul al-Kirkukli.4 In this tradition, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Durubi’s Al-Baghdadiyyun, first published in 1958, is an extensive accounting of prominent Baghdadis and their cultural institutions in the modern era, including in the early decades of the Iraqi state.5 Around the same time, shortly before his death in 1959, al-Durubi wrote a two-volume history of the judges of Baghdad’s Sharia courts from the early caliphate to the modern Iraqi state, adopting a longue durée view that seamlessly integrated Baghdad’s modern affairs with a traditional approach to understanding local history.6 Both of these works were published in new editions by the Ba‘th government in 2001, reflecting a continued interest in this mode of local historiography long after academic studies of Iraqi cities had adopted new questions and methods. Indeed, beginning in the 1950s, Iraqi, European and American scholars developed a literature on Iraq’s cities that continues to form the foundation for studies of Iraqi urbanism. In Iraq, Mustafa Jawad and Ahmad Susa led the authorship of books in Arabic that detailed spatial elements of Baghdad’s history, including detailed descriptions of the city’s geography, elaborate diagrams of key buildings and photographs highlighting architecture and materials used in construction.7 Since that time, scholars writing in English have also produced works that are primarily concerned with the frameworks and materiality of the built environment in Baghdad.8 In general, historians of Iraqi architecture and urban planning have written almost exclusively about the capital.9 Dina Khoury’s article on urban revolt in late-Ottoman Baghdad, ‘Violence and spatial politics between the local and imperial’, is a remarkable departure from most of the urbanist literature on Baghdad insofar as it reads against the grain of Ottoman archival 52

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records and traditional Arabic-language chronicles. Khoury draws conclusions about imperial–local relations and the spaces of the city from these official documents and difficult literary sources.10 Histories of cities other than Baghdad – whether covering pre-modern or modern eras and whether in local or European languages – are fewer in number. Rather than attempting to analyse architecture, geography or other spatial and material factors, histories of provincial cities tend to rely on biographical dictionaries and local chronicles, following the logic of these types of texts. These histories therefore exhibit both the potential and the constraints of these fascinating, highly detailed, but ultimately limited sources – sources that provide plentiful information about major events, social categories and the politics of leadership, but very little about the urban lived experience. Examples in this category include histories of Basra, Karbala, Kufa and Najaf.11 Some provincial urban histories of Ottoman Iraq make use of the Ottoman archives, thereby providing a clearer picture of state–society relations between the Iraqi provinces and Istanbul prior to the era of the modern Iraqi state.12 Therefore, at this point, seeking to understand state–society relations in cities in twentieth-century Iraq is a relatively innovative endeavour. The literature on urban Iraq leaves ample room for further research on state and society in Iraqi cities in the twentieth century, in both Baghdad and provincial cities. At the same time, though, this literature provides enough analytical precedents, particularly in studies of the late Ottoman era, and expositional rigour to allow for some preliminary conclusions on the subject.

Baghdad: Society in the State’s Centre In his landmark book The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq Hanna Batatu famously wrote:  ‘After the thirties, the towns came conclusively into their own. The history of Iraq became henceforth largely the history of Baghdad, and its arresting feature the transient but recurring sovereignty of the masses of the capital city.’13 With this bold statement Batatu draws a contrast between the era of shaykhly domination and that of urban protest as a crucial political tool. In Batatu’s view, shaykhs, or rural tribal leaders – the main component of the landed 53

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classes – were both the driving force in Iraqi politics and the organising element of society in the early twentieth century. In the nascent modern state, however, urban milieus became the bases of Iraqi political movements. Mass politics, rather than the ‘politics of notables’,14 influenced the state powerfully and thus dictated the direction that the country took. Batatu’s stance is informed by his observations on the Iraqi revolt against British administration in 1920. As he correctly points out, this revolt took place almost entirely in rural areas – both northern and southern – and was spearheaded by tribes in spite of its links to urban nationalists. This chapter will revisit the idea that Iraq’s post-1930s history was ‘largely the history of Baghdad’. To begin with, however, it is worth introducing some nuance into Batatu’s stark contrast between the shaykhly and urban eras, and thus between rural and urban areas. Communal identities in late-Ottoman Baghdad were, in many cases, inextricably linked with its ‘tribal’ west, known as al-Karkh, and its ‘cosmopolitan’ east, known as alRusafa.15 The concepts of ‘al-Karkh’ and ‘al-Rusafa’ as districts of Baghdad had existed since the Abbasid era, at which time they were only two among several areas; al-Karkh was a centre of construction for the newly established city, while al-Rusafa was the palace district.16 By the late Ottoman era these conceptual districts had come to signify two halves of a bisected city, divided by the Tigris. This imaginary bifurcation of the city is particularly clear in, for example, a poem by the Iraqi writer Maʿruf al-Rusafi, written to mark the opening of a Tigris bridge in 1902: ‘Al-Rusafa longed for al-Karkh, / extending a hand to touch her.’17 The most prominent literary, cultural and political salons of the city’s elites tended to be in al-Rusafa; although there were also a few salons in al-Karkh, the western district’s homes tended to be poorly built and its inhabitants were, accurately or not, associated with immigrants to the city from the mid-Euphrates area.18 The existence of a ‘tribal half ’ of Baghdad that was nevertheless well integrated into its economy, politics and culture challenges any attempt to draw a strict contrast between rural and urban spaces, demonstrating the liminality of these categories in the context of rapid urban growth and rural-to-urban migration. In her study of late-Ottoman Baghdad Dina Khoury finds that violent rebellion in the city beginning in the late eighteenth century was fundamentally a political practice in direct response 54

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to dissatisfaction with Istanbul’s influence. Rebels participating in these revolts articulated their interests through ‘embedded mentalities’ of communal identity that they associated with elements of Baghdad’s urban geography such as the aforementioned ‘west’ and ‘east’.19 Khoury’s research is essential to an understanding of similar dynamics in the twentieth century because it establishes that by the time of the establishment of the British mandate Baghdad had recent precedents of spatial-political mobilisation, identity-based divisions (albeit with fluid and shifting identity categories) and societal violence in response to encroachments of the state. These precedents were substantial, not superficial, as Batatu’s view might suggest. That said, the category of ‘state’ in Iraq after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was completely different  – and not nearly as strong. It should be noted that studies of urban state–society relations have often chosen to regard cities as an integral aspect of the relationship between state and society because of the role that they can play as sites of the manifestation of power for a strong state. In the study of the modern Arab world, this trend is evident in histories of Damascus and Cairo in the late Ottoman era, which typically examine how the Ottoman or khedivial state applied well-established social and spatial discourses in its urban construction projects and relations with local societies.20 Outside of the literature on the Middle East, the case of urban state–society relations in socialist and post-socialist China has received particularly sustained scholarly attention. For instance, George Lin has argued that Chinese cities, which tend to be viewed primarily as market centres, are also ‘an integral part of the state scaling strategy to glorify its ideological conviction, materialize its goals in spatial representations, maintain social order domestically, and enhance national strength internationally’.21 State–society relations in the Iraqi urban sphere during the monarchy era, though sharing some characteristics with these examples, are distinct because the ‘state’ was a semi-colonial entity built on military power. Here, ‘semi-colonial’ refers to the establishment of a system that would become independent after 1932 but remained susceptible to pervasive British influence and interference through a series of Anglo-Iraqi treaties, defence interventions (such as the ground invasion of Iraq in 1941) and the Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) comprehensive concession (discussed below). As for the military, both British Mandate administrators and the 55

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post-mandate Iraqi government viewed it as a critical site of collectiveidentity formation in a newly forged country, with influence extending into the civilian population for this purpose.22 Iraq’s first king, Faysal, even favoured conscription as a method of promoting unity.23 The military, as an integral institution of the state, provided a basis for an officially sanctioned Iraqi nationalist discourse but at the same time repeatedly destabilised the state’s structures by impinging on parliamentary processes and executing coups. While civilian, intellectual collective-identity formation with genuinely pluralistic ideas was certainly present in monarchy-era Iraq,24 it must be understood as part of this context. It is this weak state whose relationship with civil society within Baghdad and other cities in the monarchy era demands scrutiny. To begin with, one finds no shortage of examples of attempts by the state to, as Lin puts it, ‘materialize its goals in spatial representations’. In the early years of the mandate, British officials established departments of public works, transport and engineering and placed British engineers with experience in colonial India in charge of planning a new urban infrastructure that could meet growing military and industrial needs – telephone lines, civilian airliners, levees and heavy-duty bridges and roads that could bear the weight of automobiles. Even after 1932, the Iraqi government continued to solicit the services of British and other European advisors, engineers and consultants, whose numbers only increased as opportunities to take part in development projects grew.25 Baghdad expanded in these years with the construction of several new neighbourhoods. Al-Rusafa’s famous AlRashid Street, a centre of bookselling and leisure for the urban intelligentsia, received a south-eastern extension, Abu Nuwas Street, which became another prominent location for restaurants, cafes and parks.26 After the end of the mandate the Iraqi government began to pursue building projects in Baghdad that placed an emphasis on a vision of Iraq as independent and, above all, modern.27 The government’s renegotiation of profit-sharing with the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1950 gave them a greater share of oil revenues and led to the establishment of a Development Board – of which two members were foreign experts, one British and one American – tasked with using these revenues for modernisation schemes.28 A Greek urban planner, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, was hired to create master plans for Iraqi cities according to a ‘scientific’ Western model.29 Walter 56

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Gropius and his Massachusetts-based firm received the commission for Baghdad University, the first Iraqi university conceived on a European model, which transformed the peninsula housing the neighbourhood of al-Karrada on the eastern side of the Tigris.30 Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to build an opera house, which was never completed, that also would have fundamentally reshaped its urban surroundings. King Faysal II personally permitted Wright to build the opera house on an island in the Tigris directly opposite al-Karrada and the university. The plan included two bridges that would have linked the island to both the western and eastern sides of the Tigris.31 All of these projects served as spectacles of an ideology of modernisation while simultaneously advancing the Iraqi government’s interest in asserting greater physical control over Baghdad’s urban spaces. The fact that growing oil revenues enabled the pursuit of these projects was a key aspect of the official public relations materials promoting them. Oil, in this telling, was necessary to Iraq’s vitality, a source of national pride and a force that held the promise to make all Iraqis’ lives better. Iraqis, Europeans and Americans were exposed to these messages in Arabic and English through print media, photographs and film.32 But from the standpoint of Iraqi society the oil industry, like the projects themselves, embodied the contradictions inherent in asserting independence and nationalism through public works and industries that were ultimately reliant on concessions to foreign, usually British, experts and firms. The mass political movements of the monarchy era make it clear that many Iraqis were averse to these influences and that they retained the ability to push back against the state’s impingement through the assertion of spatial control, particularly in Baghdad. The Wathba movement of 1948, in which masses of Iraqi protestors successfully prevented the implementation of an exploitative Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, is the preeminent example of this phenomenon. Anticolonial politics even played a role in inspiring some peasants to migrate to cities for reasons beyond immediate economic needs.33 In a semi-colonial context in which anti-colonialism was firmly entrenched among the population, the contradictions in modernisation projects limited the extent to which the Iraqi state could leverage them to extend and consolidate central government power. Pelle Valentin Olsen has also suggested that resistance to the Iraqi state’s nationalist and industrialist message could be found in 57

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practices as everyday as leisurely procrastination in coffee shops, a hallmark of Baghdad’s social life.34 Furthermore, there were also physical manifestations of the state’s shortcomings in Baghdad’s urban fabric. The Development Board’s own foreign experts sharply criticised its lack of attention to projects that would ameliorate most Iraqis’ severe poverty.35 Discussions of Baghdad’s urbanism in the mid-twentieth century, and of Iraqi social and economic history in general by Iraqis and foreigners alike, usually hold the sarifa (plural saraʾif) and its inhabitants as sad emblems of the plight of the urban poor and the rapid rural-to-urban migration that brought about their living conditions. While visible rural-to-urban migration had been a feature of Baghdad’s geographical and social landscape since at least the eighteenth century, it accelerated dramatically after the implementation of the Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators in 1933. This law made sharecroppers even more vulnerable to the predation of Iraq’s small, wealthy class of large-scale landowners than they had already been during the global depression.36 The southern, predominantly Shiʿi provinces of Amara, Karbala and Kut were the largest sources of migration to Baghdad.37 The saraʾif were huts made of palm fronds, wattle and daub and improvised vernacular materials that were built irregularly on state-owned land on the outskirts of Baghdad to house these recent arrivals from rural areas. While it was typical for major Iraqi cities to experience these kinds of population influxes from their hinterlands in this time period, and while the urban poor in other cities also lived in dismal conditions, the sarifa as a symbol of rural-to-urban migration and urban poverty is invariably associated with Baghdad. By some estimates, saraʾif constituted up to 45 per cent of Baghdad’s houses in the last years of the monarchy.38 The significance of the sarifa shantytowns as tangible spatial and material representations of the perceived economic and social failures of the Iraqi monarchy is evident in accounts by contemporaries. For instance, Muhammad Hadid, a prominent opposition politician under the monarchy, who would eventually play a role in the revolutionary government, described taking a British visitor to see the saraʾif outside of Baghdad just before the revolution of July 1958.39 His guest, Barbara Castle, a baroness and Member of Parliament, was moved by what she saw: 58

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STATE–SOCIETY RELATIONS IN THE URBAN SPHERES She saw the painful sight of the huts stacked close together in a random manner, deprived of basic means of life such as running water, sewerage, and paved roads. They resembled livestock stables in a backwards country, not an advanced one. The district had been built by fellahin and newcomers from rural areas to Baghdad escaping their poor conditions and seeking work. They considered their living conditions, with all their severity, better than those in the countryside. This sight had a strong impact on Mrs Castle. She denounced the prevailing situation in Baghdad, which was considered more advanced than other regions of the country.40

Hadid’s aim with this unusual side trip was to shatter an illusion that his guest’s own government had played a significant role in creating, that of Baghdad as a paragon of economic and social ‘advancement’ as opposed to ‘backwardness’. It is worth noting that in doing so Hadid implicitly endorsed the same vocabulary – subscribing, as many prominent Iraqis did, to the same ethos of development that the state promoted. It was common in this time period for the Iraqi intelligentsia to disdain rural migrants to cities as unhygienic, indolent and a threat to the nationalist project.41 The presence of the saraʾif unsettled any imaginary of the city that relied on the spectacle of oil wealth and an urbane elite, blurring boundaries between the capital and its provinces. The Iraqi state’s inability or unwillingness to meet the ideal of ‘advancement’ was a reliable source of disaffection from which these opposition politicians and intellectuals drew, indicating their own favour for state-driven development projects. Indeed, the revolutionary government would continue to attempt projects of this type after the fall of the monarchy in 1958.

The Provincial Urban Experience: Another Perspective on the State Of course, the sphere of urban state–society relations in monarchy-era Iraq extends beyond Baghdad. At this point it makes sense to return to Batatu’s iconic argument– that after the mandate fashioned the modern state, the history of Iraq became ‘largely the history of Baghdad’. The author of this chapter has observed elsewhere that, historiographically, histories of Iraq 59

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do in fact tend to be histories of Baghdad. Political, social and intellectual sources in the modern state overwhelmingly emanate from the capital and its influential milieus.42 This observation should not imply that Iraq’s provincial cities were politically trivial in the decades following the mandate – indeed, it should instead provoke a greater interest in understanding what those cities can reveal about modern Iraqi politics and society. While they were less likely to be sites of the kinds of protest activities, such as the Wathba, that shaped the contours of national politics, Iraq’s provincial cities experienced the influence of the state differently than the urban communities of the capital did in significant ways. First, the exceptional diversity and religious, tribal and linguistic liminality of the Iraqi provinces, especially in the north, produced distinct forms of group identity and thus of sectarianisation or ethnicisation. Second, a provincial-urban perspective throws the Iraqi state’s hybridity – its contradictions between local and central governments and its reliance on foreign advisors and private capital – into sharp relief. Examining the cities on Iraq’s margins therefore opens up productive lines of inquiry with regard to the nature of the relationship between the modern state and Iraqi society. The provincial urban experience in Iraq was by no means homogeneous. Basra, for example, was distinct for having a relatively advanced infrastructure and longstanding presence of non-natives due to its position as a port on the Persian Gulf.43 Mosul was noteworthy for having long been independently ruled until it was integrated under direct Ottoman control in the nineteenth century and for being an Arabic-speaking entrepot to a predominantly non-Arab region.44 The cities that served as centres of Shiʿi learning, Najaf and Karbala, saw ulama playing essential communal leadership roles, and were consequently nodes in scholarly patronage networks extending far beyond Iraq.45 All of these varied conditions in language, culture, local governance and external connections played a role in provincial cities’ relations with the state. They produced interactions that could be superficially similar – for instance, anti-regime protests met with violence from security forces – but were fundamentally mediated by local interests. This chapter will use Kirkuk, the multilingual borderland and oil hub in north-eastern Iraq, as a case study, for reasons explained below. Kirkuk is an especially illustrative case of how provincial cities can add to an understanding of urbanism and the nature of the state in Iraq beyond 60

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Baghdad. First of all, Kirkuk’s experience demonstrates how the impact of nationalist discourses promoted by the state in certain places is contingent on those places’ relationship with the state. Located to the north-east of the Arabic-speaking Tigris riverine milieu that encompasses Baghdad and Mosul, Kirkuk has long been a multilingual region. Under the Ottomans the dominant vernacular language in urban Kirkuk was a local dialect of Turkish similar to South Azeri, while Kurdish, Arabic and Neo-Aramaic were also commonly spoken in the town and its hinterland. Kirkuk is a ‘borderland’ in the sense that it inevitably slips beyond the boundaries of ethnic, sectarian, cultural, linguistic and national designations. For the first several years of the Iraqi mandate, although Kirkuk was formally under the control of Baghdad’s Anglo-Iraqi administration, its political status was actively contested by Kirkukis who were against Baghdad’s interference in local affairs and the requirement of integration into a mostly Arab state.46 Therefore, once the central government began to consolidate its influence in Kirkuk in the mid-1920s the effects of such initiatives only drove those factions further apart. Introducing Arabic as the primary language of instruction in Kirkuk’s secondary schools, for example, fomented controversy, especially among Kurdish-speaking people.47 Studies of collective identity that focus on capital cities such as Baghdad and Damascus during European mandates generally find that as city dwellers unified against the external force of imperialism, identity-based fault lines faded and a new nationalism emerged.48 In Kirkuk, however, ‘nationalism’ did not mean the same thing to all people. Some Kirkukis benefited from the patronage of the central government, particularly if they were urban elites employed as civil servants, and thus were inclined to promote its interests; others subscribed to an emergent Kurdish nationalism or no nationalism at all.49 The same trends that engendered pluralistic notions of unity among different groups in the capital, therefore, could actually contribute to the crystallisation of conflicting identity-based groupings in the provinces, where society’s frames of reference for relations with the state were fundamentally different. This effect of the state’s interaction with Kirkuk would become salient after 1958 when, amidst the destabilising effects of revolution, the city descended into sustained intercommunal violence between Kurds and Turkmens for the first time in the modern era. 61

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The alienation of Kurds and the attraction of Kurdish nationalism was exacerbated by the spatial dimensions of rural-to-urban migration, since Kurds made up most of the population in Kirkuk’s hinterland, while the city had historically been dominated by Turkish speakers. As in Baghdad, recent rural migrants in Kirkuk lived in poor conditions on the outskirts of town. The fastest-growing neighbourhood by far in mid-twentieth-century Kirkuk, Shorija, was destitute and overwhelmingly Kurdish; its population more than tripled in size between 1947 and 1957.50 Kurdish nationalist activities were also concentrated in the hinterland, only rarely becoming evident in the city prior to the 1958 revolution.51 The physical marginalisation of Kurds within Kirkuk was therefore intertwined with both their political marginalisation and the appeal of a specifically Kurdish form of political activity. In other words, one can draw a direct line from the urban experience in Kirkuk to the ethnicisation of politics – the process by which categories such as ‘Kurdish’ and ‘Turkmen’ became bases for contentious mobilisation. Kirkuk is also particularly relevant to a study of urban state–society relations in Iraq because its multilayered local politics necessitate a clearer definition of what constitutes the ‘state’. Nowhere is this clearer than in the role of the Iraq Petroleum Company in local politics. IPC, Kirkuk’s largest employer in the monarchy era, was, strictly speaking, a private entity. It was a British-registered firm in which British, French, American and Dutch oil interests had shares. But the British government itself was invested in IPC through its investment in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which held 23.5 per cent of IPC’s shares. Thanks to a 1925 concession, IPC had a virtual monopoly on Iraqi oil exploration and production. The company had its headquarters and a large residential camp for its executives, all of whom were foreign, just outside of Kirkuk’s municipal boundaries.52 The IPC’s enormous social and economic presence in Kirkukis’ daily lives – by one estimate, by the late 1940s workers and their families may have made up over 40 per cent of Kirkuk’s population– made the city fertile ground for labour organisation.53 The emergent Iraqi Communist Party seized upon this opportunity in 1946 to attempt to unionise IPC workers; then, upon their failure to realise their demands for better wages and working conditions, they successfully called for a strike. The strike evolved into a daily urban protest that took 62

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place in an orchard on the western edge of the Kirkuk municipality itself. A  week and a half later, with the protests still ongoing, the governor of the Kirkuk province sent police in to quell the strikers; the police shot at the protestors, wounding dozens and killing at least ten.54 While the police intervention formally occurred on the provincial governor’s orders, declassified United States Department of State files have since revealed that the British vice-consul in Kirkuk disclosed to his American counterparts that he had suggested using force against the protestors to the governor.55 Given the close relationship between British diplomats and the IPC evident in many other communications,56 the idea that the company itself played a role in this massacre is also plausible. Certainly, Kirkukis held all of these entities – the IPC, British officials and Iraqi officials – responsible for the disaster. The blurring of distinctions between the company, the informalimperial power and the Iraqi government was not only a perception held by Kirkuki society but a very real aspect of local political dynamics. This fact was further made manifest when the IPC began to lead urban development projects in Kirkuk in collaboration with British and Iraqi officials as a way of managing the fallout from the strike and promoting its own local power.57 What, then, was the ‘state’ in monarchy-era Iraq? Kirkuk, with its experience of a complex human geography distinct from Baghdad’s and an extractive industry fused with semi-colonial influence, exemplifies the subtlety required to answer this question. During the pursuit of development initiatives beginning in the late 1940s, the interests of the IPC, British officials, the Kirkuki municipal and provincial governments and the Iraqi central government often clashed. Generally speaking, the local governments attempted to extract resources and favours out of the IPC and Baghdad, while the IPC demonstrated both a reluctance to get involved in politics and a desire to use its infrastructural advantages to exercise leverage over the municipality. Baghdad, for its part, also took advantage of the IPC’s unique power to demand that the company provide services such as educational programs for its workers.58 Amidst all these interactions, no single state interest or agenda readily emerges. A  provincial-urban perspective demonstrates that, in any study of state–society relations, the researcher would do well to first separate the components of the state and the possibility that those components’ interests may not be uniform. 63

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Conclusion This chapter points to the conclusion that fragmentations in Iraqi society evident today must be understood as phenomena stemming partly from several urban trends of the Hashemite era:  the rapid expansion of cities; the growth of labour and the urban poor; and the power relationships between government, industry and British authorities. Most importantly, these fragmentations are not primarily the product of ethnic or religious differences, but rather of a fundamentally divisive socioeconomic foundation atop which Iraqi citizens gradually came to mobilise along lines of sectarianised or ethnicised group identity. Returning to the question that opened this chapter, the reading of urban histories to understand colonial and semi-colonial Iraq clarifies all of these dynamics. Baghdad, the capital, and provincial meeting points like Kirkuk were among the most significant sites in which various groups within Iraqi society interacted directly with the entities of the state. In the process, the nature of these interactions illuminates the lines along which Iraqi society divided, as well as the often-disaggregated forms of state power. The cases explored in this chapter also point towards ways that the study of state–society relations in Iraq and the study of Iraqi urban history can reinforce one another. Joel Migdal’s ‘state-in-society approach’, which highlights the fragmented, hybridised, often-weak state as existing at odds with the coherent image of the state,59 can be applied to Iraq through the study of state–society relations in the urban sphere. Migdal’s ideas are especially relevant to a country with a colonial legacy and thus a distinct legacy of state fragmentation – a phenomenon that is particularly clear in urban political domains. Conversely, scholars of Iraqi history who would like to expand the potential of limited sources on the histories of cities can use an approach that reads the relationship of society and state into biographical, literary and spatial evidence.

Notes 1. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2003); Liora Lukitz, Iraq:  The Search for National Identity (London:  Frank Cass, 1995); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). 2. Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).

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STATE–SOCIETY RELATIONS IN THE URBAN SPHERES 3. Leila Fawaz and Robert Ilbert, ‘Political relations between city and state in the colonial period’, in Peter Sluglett (ed.), The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750–1950 (Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 141–53. 4. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Tarikh Baghdad aw Madinat al-Salam, 24 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya 2004); Rasul Al-Kirkukli, Dawhat al-Wuzara’ fi Tarikh Waqa’i‘ Baghdad al-Zawra’, trans. by Musa Kazim Nawras (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi., n.d.). 5. Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Ghani Al-Durubi, Al-Baghdadiyyun:  Akhbaruhum waMajalisuhum (Baghdad: Dar al-Shuʾun al-Thaqafiyya al-‘Amma, 2001). 6. Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Ghani Al-Durubi, Qada Baghdad, 2 vols (Baghdad:  Dar alShu’un al-Thaqafiyya al-‘Amma, 2001). 7. Mustafa Jawad and Ahmad Susa, Dalil Kharitat Baghdad al-Mufassal fi Khitat Baghdad Qadiman wa-Hadithan (Baghdad:  Matbu‘at al-Majma‘ al‘Ilmi al ‘Iraqi, 1958); Mustafa Jawad, Ahmad Susa, Muhammad Makiyya and Naji Ma‘ruf, Baghdad (Baghdad:  Niqabat al-Muhandisin al-‘Iraqiyya, 1969). 8. Caecilia Pieri, Baghdad Arts Deco:  Architectural Brickwork, 1920–1950 (Cairo:  American University in Cairo Press, 2010); John Warren and Ihsan Fethi, Traditional Houses in Baghdad (Horsham:  Coach Publishing House, 1982). 9. Amin Alsaden, ‘Baghdad modernism:  duplicity of mirages and a crisis of history’, WTD 3 (2013); Mona Damluji, ‘“Securing democracy in Iraq”:  sectarian politics and segregation in Baghdad, 2003–7’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 21/2 (2010), pp. 71–87; Mina Marefat, ‘1950s Baghdad – modern and international’, TAARII Newsletter 2/2 (2007), pp. 1–7; Mina Marefat, ‘From Bauhaus to Baghdad: the politics of building the total university’, TAARII Newsletter 3/2 (2008); Panayiota Pyla, ‘Back to the future: Doxiadis’s plans for Baghdad’, Journal of Planning History 7/1 (2008), pp. 3–19; Joseph M. Siry, ‘Wright’s Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium:  in search of regional modernity’, The Art Bulletin 87/2 (2005), pp. 265–311. 10. Dina R. Khoury, ‘Violence and spatial politics between the local and imperial:  Baghdad, 1778–1810’, in Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse (eds), The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 181–213, 182. 11. Hamid Al-Bazi, Al-Basra fi-l Fatra al-Muzlima (Baghdad:  Matba‘at Dar al-Basri, 1969); Hichem Djaït, Al-Kufa:  Naissance de la Ville Islamique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Meir Litvak, Shi‘a Scholars of NineteenthCentury Iraq:  The ‘Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbala’ (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 12. Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Gökhan Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908 (London: Routledge, 2006); Dina R. Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sarah D. Shields, Mosul Before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). 13. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq:  A  Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 119. 14. Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman reform and the politics of notables’, in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 41–68; Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, p. 2. 15. Khoury, ‘Violence and spatial politics between the local and imperial’. 16. Ira M. Lapidus, Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 91. 17. Ma‘ruf Al-Rusafi, ‘The bridge’ [1902], in Reuven Snir (ed. and trans.), Baghdad: The City in Verse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 184. 18. Al-Durubi, Al-Baghdadiyyun; Khoury, ‘Violence and spatial politics between the local and imperial’, pp. 193–4, 211n46. 19. Khoury, ‘Violence and spatial politics between the local and imperial’. 20. Yaron Ayalon, ‘Ottoman urban privacy in light of disaster recovery’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/3 (2011), pp. 513–28; André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 309–38. 21. George C.S. Lin, ‘Chinese urbanism in question: state, society, and the reproduction of urban spaces’, Urban Geography 28/1 (2007), pp. 7–29, 9. 22. Khaled Salih, State-Making, Nation-Building, and the Military: Iraq, 1941–1958 (Göteborg: Göteborg University 1996), pp. 61–2. 23. Mohammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1982), p. 185. 24. Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq:  Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 25. Pieri, Baghdad Arts Deco, pp. 31–2, 45; Siry, ‘Wright’s Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium’, p. 271. 26. Yaseen Raad, ‘A spatial history of a main Baghdadi street’, Jadaliyya, 27 October 2015. Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23024/a-spatial-history-of-a-main-baghdadi-street (accessed 9 November 2016). 27. Pieri, Baghdad Arts Deco, pp. 41–2. 28. Michael Ionides, Divide and Lose:  The Arab Revolt of 1955–1958 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960).

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STATE–SOCIETY RELATIONS IN THE URBAN SPHERES 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

Pyla, ‘Back to the future’. Marefat, ‘From Bauhaus to Baghdad’. Siry, ‘Wright’s Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium’, pp. 271–4. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, ‘Kirkuk, 1918–1968:  oil and the politics of identity in an Iraqi city’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2012, pp.  224–35; Mona Damluji, ‘Petroleum’s promise:  the neo-colonial imaginary of oil cities in the modern Arabian Gulf ’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2013. Kevin M. Jones, ‘The poetics of revolution: cultures, practices, and politics of anti-colonialism in Iraq, 1932–1960’, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013, p. 149. Laurie Taylor, ‘Interview: history of surfing; coffee shops and idleness’, Thinking Allowed, 30 June 2014. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047bzlj (accessed 1 July 2014). Ionides, Divide and Lose; Arthur Salter, The Development of Iraq:  A  Plan of Action (London: Caxton Press, 1955). Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, pp. 178–80. Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘is of Iraq (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press 1994), p. 96. Hoshiar Nooraddin, ‘Globalization and the search for modern local architecture: learning from Baghdad’, in Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.), Planning Middle Eastern Cities:  An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World (London:  Routledge, 2004), pp. 59–84, 65. Muhammad Hadid, Mudhakkirati: al-Sira‘ Min Ajl al-Dimuqratiyya fi-l-‘Iraq (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2006), pp. 313–14. Ibid., p. 314. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, pp. 202–3. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, ‘Beyond Baghdad:  writing a history from the Iraqi periphery’, Arab Studies Journal 23/1 (2015). Ferhang Jalal, The Role of Government in the Industrialization of Iraq, 1950–1965 (London: F. Cass 1972), p. 8. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 10–11. Litvak, Shi‘a Scholars of Nineteenth-Century Iraq. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, ‘Group identities, oil, and the local political domain in Kirkuk: a historical perspective’, Journal of Urban History 38/5 (2012), pp. 914–31, 916; Cecil J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks, and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq, 1919–1925 (London: Oxford University Press 1957), pp. 118–20, 280–352. Bet-Shlimon, ‘Kirkuk, 1918–1968’, pp. 172–4; Amir Hassanpour, Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1919–1985 (San Francisco, CA:  Mellen Research University Press, 1992), pp. 311–16.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 48. Bashkin, The Other Iraq; Philip S. Khoury, ‘Syrian urban politics in transition: the quarters of Damascus during the French mandate’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 16/4 (1984), pp. 507–40. 49. Bet-Shlimon, ‘Kirkuk, 1918–1968’. 50. Ibid., pp. 165–7. 51. Ibid., p. 276. 52. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, ‘The politics and ideology of urban development in Iraq’s oil city: Kirkuk, 1946–1958’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33/1 (2013), pp. 26–40, 27–8. 53. Bet-Shlimon, ‘Kirkuk, 1918–1968’, p. 161. 54. Batatu, The Old Social Classes, pp. 532–3. 55. Jones ‘The poetics of revolution’, p. 274. 56. Bet-Shlimon, ‘The politics and ideology of urban development in Iraq’s oil city’. 57. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 58. Ibid., pp. 35–8. 59. Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 15–16.

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3 ‘The Government is the Servant of the People’: State and Society in the Short Stories of Shakir Khuṣbak and Gha’ib Ṭu’ma Farman Hilla Peled-Shapira The Iraqi writers Shakir Khusbak (1930–) and Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman (1927–90) are among the pioneers of modern Iraqi literature, members of the ‘generation of the 1950s’, a generation that aspired to create new local patterns of stories, but imbued with a humanism that makes them also universal.1 Both spent time in Egypt with prominent Egyptian writers and journalists and were artistically influenced by Western writers as well; they were sympathetic towards communism and witnessed and documented the horrors and persecution of their times. Khusbak’s and Farman’s writings were not widely disseminated, due to the fact that the authorities considered them ideologically dangerous. And yet, as later developments in the history of Iraq showed, even when exiles like them did not have a great deal of political power, they could still ‘develop a critique and counterpoint to the dominant existing order’,2 as will be shown in this chapter. The underlying hypothesis of the current chapter is that the artistic depictions of this persecution and violence in the stories ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ (‘Years of Terror’)3 and ‘Sa’a 12’ (‘Twelfth Hour’)4 are used by the writers to convey a socio-political message. Furthermore, since the torture of opposition figures during the 1950s continued into post-monarchic Iraq,5 this chapter claims that these descriptions of state–society relations reflect 69

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not only the situation during the monarchic period, but also predict the clashes between opposition intellectuals and the state in the days to come. These matters will be discussed using these two stories as an archive and by exploring the discourse presented in them regarding the role of the state and its institutions, mainly the police, as against the role of intellectuals and intellectuals-to-be, and the relationship between the two, as perceived by these two writers.

Shakir Khusbak and Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman: A Biographical Sketch Shakir Khusbak was born in the Iraqi city of Al-Hilla in 1930. He studied social science at Cairo University and then travelled to England, where he received his Master’s and PhD degrees in social geography. Khusbak worked as a lecturer at Baghdad University; he has also written short stories, novels and plays, mostly in a realistic mode.6 Although he was not affiliated with the communist party, in 1953 he started working for al-Thaqafa al-jadida magazine, which was identified with the communists. The Iraqi authorities closed the journal after the publication of its first issue, as they did other organs of opposition parties7 and even more ‘innocent’ literary periodicals that they suspected of stimulating independent thought.8 In 1954 the authorities arrested the journal’s writers and senior staff members and Khusbak escaped arrest only because he had left for England, where he went on to describe the regime’s acts as ‘crimes against the communists’, probably in the wake of the execution of the leaders of the Iraqi Communist Party.9 Despite this, unrest would continue to be part of Iraqi life, as already predicted by Majid Khadduri in 1951.10 In 1963 Khusbak was eventually arrested and accused of being a communist, and only by chance was saved from execution.11 Khusbak’s contemporary Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman not only had difficulties publishing his books due to his Marxist beliefs12 but also had to struggle even for his livelihood, since the Iraqi authorities deprived him of his citizenship and did not let him work in Iraq. Farman was born and raised in a poor neighbourhood of Baghdad and was sensitive to social injustices and inequalities, like other people who came from a similar background.13 Like Khusbak, he too expressed his views on political and social issues, as 70

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an intellectual who rejected the state’s insistence on blind subordination, as a part of the split between two main camps: the state and the politicians on the one hand and intellectuals and underground political movements on the other.14 Since he was a communist, although not active in the movement, and also suffered from bad health and economic problems, he had to emigrate. He stayed in various countries until he eventually settled in Moscow, married a Russian woman and died and was buried there. Farman’s death in Russia is tragic and symbolic, since he constantly wrote about his memories of Baghdad and expressed his longing for it. His death in Russia was the bitter end of a man who tried to contribute to Iraqi literature, and indeed he is considered the first in that country to have succeeded in writing a modern novel in 1965. He spent the last 30 years of his life translating novels from Russian to Arabic, and wrote eight original novels in addition to two collections of short stories that were published in the 1950s.15

Social Realism in Iraqi Literature The term ‘social realism’ was coined in the 1930s as a mode of artistic expression that aspired not only to demonstrate social injustices but also to show solutions in the spirit of Soviet socialism.16 Arab writers in the middle of the twentieth century put great emphasis on social themes in their works in a way that connected their writing with national and social struggles.17 In this stage of development of Arabic literature, the stage of social-realism, political and social discontent found its way to literature, while exposing social problems and difficulties, mainly of the lower strata. In Iraq, social realism was well represented by Khusbak and Farman, who both strove to depict Iraqi social reality and the everyday life of the individual as accurately as possible.18 While the previous generation of Iraqi writers was reticent about discussing the status of women, for example, the next generation of writers, to which the current chapter refers, dared to break both political and social taboos, and dealt fearlessly with themes like political persecution, prostitution and the relations between the sexes, describing social injustices without embellishment.19 The works of Khusbak and Farman discussed in this chapter are good examples of this kind of writing, since both writers 71

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were part of the literary milieu that tended to social progress, rebellion and ‘commitment’ under the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s terminology, and as intellectuals they believed that changing society was their duty. They ‘felt the acute need to both critique and change their society. This criticism created a continual conflict with the state’.20

The Short Stories: Plots, Main Themes and Historical Background ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ (‘Years of Terror’, 1951) by Khusbak expresses the defiant attitude of young intellectuals in the city of Al-Hilla towards the government’s policies during the monarchic period and against their parents’ quiet acceptance of this state of affairs. ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ describes in detail how young opposition intellectuals were persecuted in Iraq in the mid-twentieth century through the story of a young student pursued by the police for having given a speech during a demonstration against the government. As soon as the father in the story, ‘Abd al-’Abbas, a simple carpenter through whose eyes the story is told, hears about riots in the streets of Al-Hilla, he knows that his only son, Wahid, is in trouble. The father goes out to look for Wahid but cannot find him anywhere. When the father comes home, he finds his wife beside herself with worry and tries to calm her down, but with no success. Suddenly Wahid appears at home, after having been beaten and mauled by the police. He seeks shelter, and hides inside the well in the corner of the room. Wahid survives two searches by the police but when the policemen threaten to take his father away Wahid gives himself up, and the gendarmes violently take him with them.21 ‘Sa’a 12’ (‘Twelfth Hour’, 1957) by Farman is chronologically located somewhere between 1953 and 1957, since the story alludes to the Intifada of November 1952 and was published in 1957. This is the story of ‘Alwan, who had been badly injured by a bullet shot by the police during a demonstration in Baghdad. ‘Alwan is recuperating in his brother’s bedroom while his sister-in-law, Sabiha, and her father Mahmud stay with him, trying to relieve his pain. In flashbacks ‘Alwan remembers the previous day’s meeting and the police chase in which he was wounded. The only thing on ‘Alwan’s mind is to warn his friends in time, before their meeting at 72

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11.45 a.m. the same day, because the police are after them. The whole story focuses on ‘Alwan’s attempts to get out of bed in spite of his injury in order to warn his friends, while Sabiha’s father is trying to convince him not to do so. Sabiha, on the other hand, understands ‘Alwan and tries to help. Finally ‘Alwan goes out even though he is wanted by the police.22 The story is told in the first person, from ‘Alwan’s own point of view. Although the son in ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ does not openly describe himself as a communist, we may assume from the story’s atmosphere of persecution that he either belonged or was close to the party, especially since the story takes place in the late 1940s or 1950 at the latest, a period in which, especially between June 1947 to September 1948, ‘the [communist] party was at a high point of its influence’23 and ‘was transformed into a highly organised and centralised party, with local committees gradually covering the country’.24 The party had considerable influence in Al-Hilla, where 80 out of 3,000 copies of the communist party’s organ al-Qa’ida were distributed.25 Another historical fact that strengthens the assumption that the son in the story, Wahid, is a communist is that the Shi‘a area of Al-Hilla provided the Communist Party with relatively many members, in comparison to other, Sunni-majority provinces. The influence of the party in Greater Baghdad was even more pronounced, to judge by the total of 1,380 distributed copies of al-Qa’ida, 410 of them among college students and secondary schools. The great public interest in the communist party in Baghdad is not surprising, since the party centre was located there.26 The meaning of all this is that communist influence was widespread, and that school and college students, who could be neither underestimated nor ignored, were naturally attracted to the Iraqi Communist Party which, especially between 1941 and 1949, constituted ‘an organisational response to the increasingly repressive Iraqi state’.27 Furthermore, during the monarchic period it was very common to look on the Iraqi authorities as traitors and agents of the British.28 Thus, students under communist influence carried out many demonstrations in both Al-Hilla and Baghdad, and the story of Khusbak vividly reflects this historical fact. In Farman’s story we cannot be sure of the protagonist’s ideology, but we do know that he was wanted by the police in the wake of a demonstration in which he took part, and that he probably belonged to the moderate left. We learn this from the fact that the meeting he attended on the 73

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day of the shooting was held in a room on whose wall there hung a picture of Ja’far Abu al-Timman, one of the prominent figures of the Leftist Ahali Group and the leader of the National Party. This group was founded in 1931 by young men with social-democratic leanings who strove to improve and reform social injustices29 and was a dominant factor in the demonstrations.30

The Generation Gap: Attitudes Towards Political Activism In his book Reading Iraq Muhsin al-Musawi relates to the opening of ‘A’wam al-ru’b’, saying that the protagonist – that is, the narrator – ‘surveys the socio-political scene as one that is lulled into silence through years of repression’. Musawi considers this description quite problematic, since the protagonist implies that before the British occupation of Iraq everything was calm and quiet and when the British came it began to be ‘messy’, while in fact the Shi‘as of Iraq began to become involved in politics and public affairs only in the 1940s, and not in the 1920s when the British took over.31 It is worth mentioning here that the Iraqi residents of Al-Hilla described in the story are indeed Shi‘as, not only due to their place of residence but also judging from the fact that they swore in the name of Husayn. The Shi‘as were a majority persecuted by the Ottoman, British and Iraqi armies.32 The distinction that Musawi makes between before and after the British came to Iraq is logical with regard to Khusbak’s story; it was not only Khusbak who wrote about those years of terror or horror (ru’b) but Farman also referred to the British era in Iraq as irhab (terror).33 This attitude towards the regime symbolises the new era of the 1940s and post-1940s, when the Left ‘emerged as a viable political option to many educated individuals’;34 thus a change had occurred in the attitude of the people towards the government and they increased their involvement in politics, as the two stories suggest. At the beginning of the story ‘A’wam al-ru’b’, the father describes how in the past everyone was content with their situation, happy with the loaf of bread they earned, until the elections began and people started to interfere in the affairs of the state. Then, whenever the gendarmes came to the father’s store and ordered him to vote for whomever they saw fit, he did as 74

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they demanded, and felt safe from ‘trouble’, but usually he did his best to avoid the authorities.35 This description of affairs as reflected in Khusbak’s story is accurate, for the British did find in Iraq a system in which the police determined which clerks to appoint to official positions, and policemen used to collect people on the street and make them vote for the adherents of Nuri al-Said,36 the man who initiated and promoted the idea of using the military forces for political ends.37 The father in the story views previous periods as calmer than the period in which the story is set and considers the present time as unbearable.38 As far as the father is concerned, the government does with the people as it wishes and no one is allowed to take revenge. ‘Playing games’ with the government is very unwise and, according to the father, police violence against the elderly is a result of young people’s interference in the government’s affairs. In stark contrast, the son Wahid used to answer his father with great enthusiasm: ‘No, father. It is the people’s right to intervene in the government’s affairs, since the government is the servant of the people.’ This sentence neatly sums up the gap in their perception of the government’s role. The father sees the government as an untouchable entity that the people serve, while the son is positive that the government has to serve the people and not vice versa.39 The father’s generation supports a passive approach of no intervention in politics. But the son’s generation believes that the citizenry should be involved in politics and that such involvement is in the country’s best interest. In addition, we may assume that the father’s generation was more religious, to judge by the trust in God expressed by the parents, their prayers and some of the father’s religious phrases, as when he says that the government had deviated from the correct path, in the religious sense: ‘al-hukuma al-munharifa ‘an al-sirat al-mustaqim’.40 In ‘Sa’a 12’ the role of the fathers vs the role of the sons is more implicit and is reflected in the way in which two different characters relate to ‘Alwan’s mission to warn his friends. ‘Alwan sends his young sister-in-law, Sabiha, to his friend Ibrahim’s home in the Battawin neighbourhood of Baghdad with a note ‘Alwan has written in order to warn him, but Ibrahim is not at home and Sabiha returns without delivering the message. This is odd, since ‘Alwan and Ibrahim had agreed to meet at exactly 11.45 a.m. with the placards before they knew about any complications; at noon they 75

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were supposed to join a demonstration. Ibrahim’s absence and his locked home mean that he was probably arrested. In contrast to Sabiha, who is willing to go out once more later and even begs ‘Alwan to send her instead of himself, Mahmud, Sabiha’s father, who belongs to the older generation, tries to convince him not to leave his bed because of his medical condition. Mahmud supports the communists, but not openly as the younger generation does. ‘Alwan thinks about the morgue and how easily he could have ended up there. He remembers how the police once arrested him and locked him up with a thief and three other men who were accused of operating a brothel. Ironically, on the evening of his arrest the three men were released by a whore who had come to take them, while the student remained in custody, together with the thief.41 His willingness to suffer the policeman’s contemptuous dismissal ‘You are toddlers … what do you know about politics?’42 and still remain a political activist illustrates the active approach of the younger generation. In ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ the only people of the father’s generation who were put in jail were murderers, thieves and thugs, but as a consequence of the clashes between the state and the new generation many young men are incarcerated for minor infractions like irresponsibility and recklessness. While the father tried very hard all his life to avoid problems and ignored the call of the government to take part in politics, lately he frequently sees many of his neighbours’ sons thrown into jail, and he views this urge to join politics as characterising the new generation as a whole. Eventually his worst fears are realised and Wahid is caught. The father describes that day as the worst that the city of Al-Hilla has seen in a long time. In the end the son has to spend three years of his young life in prison.43 The protagonist of ‘Sa’a 12’, too, faces arrest and later is even shot by the police. He knows exactly how people are tortured in the basements of police stations, a fact that makes him even more determined to warn his friends. While some of his friends are taking a test at the Faculty of Humanities, ‘Alwan feels that he is taking a test in real life with his attempts to deliver the message to them. He draws a parallel between the two experiences; that is, the two tests.44 He is willing to take all these risks in the name of the cause, including being thrown to prison, and in spite of the fact that he has already experienced jail and its horrors. The reader 76

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comes to understand that ‘Alwan suffered very cold nights at the AbuGhraib detention camp in the past.45 This constitutes an autobiographical element, since Farman was indeed a detainee in the same place himself in 1952.46 It should be noted that the opposition’s hopes were dashed not only before the Intifada of 195247 but also later, around the time of King Faysal II’s coronation in 1953 and again, after the elections of August 1954, the repression only increased48 and Iraq still suffered ‘suppression of the opposition and freezing of political life’ by Nuri al-Said, who neutralised the political parties and saw communism as a threat.49 In 1956 riots and demonstrations erupted in the cities of Iraq, including Baghdad, in support of Egypt in its war with Israel, Britain and France in that year. In these events the Iraqi authorities brought in large numbers of troops and policemen. They carried out an enormous number arrests, closed schools and ‘frustrated attempts to establish coordination and joint leadership between the illegal opposition parties’. They even asked for the help of the Shi‘a leaders in order to restore order.50 Thus we should take into account the possibility that Farman may be alluding to these events as well, since it seems that the Intifada of 1952 is only one of the events discussed in the story. The two camps in these stories, intellectuals on the one hand and the state on the other, are in line with al-Musawi’s description of the two camps that existed in the last years of the monarchy,51 but here the conflict takes on a further dimension, as it also includes the generation gap. In any case, both writers do put emphasis on the need for political reform,52 especially in the view of the younger generation. In Khusbak’s and Farman’s stories there are two opposing approaches. The fathers are more conservative in their religion as well as in their attitude towards the government; they prefer not to interfere in the government’s affairs and not to take part in any political activity, certainly not in any activity that is in opposition to the government. This old generation is trying to keep the younger generation out of trouble, with no success. The other approach is that of the younger generation that, to judge by its language, is more liberal religiously, lacks religious phrases, and is very determined to play an important role in bringing progress to Iraq. This generation is prepared to sacrifice its freedom and even its life in the name of this cause, and does not mind confronting the government and its representatives. 77

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Student Demonstrations in Iraq The first student demonstration in Baghdad took place in the 1920s in protest against the dismissal of a Lebanese lecturer because of a book he had written; further demonstrations followed. Back then demonstrations would be attended by students of all ages, from elementary school to college, and not everyone who took part really understood what the demonstrations were about.53 By the 1940s things had changed dramatically and students became very involved politically, as in the stories discussed here. In the late 1940s, especially under the reign of Nuri al-Said, student strikes and demonstrations raged unabated in many cities, including Al-Hilla, despite the arrest of hundreds of ICP members. Students’ roles in the political activity of those years were crucial.54 Khusbak’s ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ gives a vivid portrayal of a demonstration. A rather chaotic gathering of students and other people in the street ends with a sudden loud noise and screams filling the air; within a minute the marketplace becomes crowded with hundreds of angry, terrified and screaming students running in fear, with blood covering their faces and clothes.55 The dialogue in the story is minimal but emphasises the active role that young students intend to play in Iraq’s future. Wahid sums up this idea when he shouts angrily at his father that if no fathers feel any responsibility towards their homeland (like Wahid’s father) then how can there be any reform? How will it change for the better?56 Here Wahid clearly distinguishes between the two generations with regard to their attitude towards the authorities. As Wahid sees it, the older generation cannot bring progress to Iraq since it does not want to intervene in the government’s affairs. In contrast, Wahid’s mission is to demand justice and defend the dignity of his homeland, Iraq. While the father asserts that wise people avoid politics, the son asserts that any wise man has the duty to become involved in politics, whatever the outcome. ‘Fathers like you poison the souls of their sons and raise them upon getting used to cowardice, humiliation and subservience’, Wahid says to his father.57 The protagonist of Farman’s story ‘Sa’a 12’ is a high school student who, together with his friends, constituted a perceived threat to the regime. At the beginning of the story, the reader does not know exactly why the protagonist had been shot. Step by step the author takes the reader on a path 78

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that slowly reveals the reasons for the brutal attack. On the previous day ‘Alwan, the student, attended a gathering of opposition activists that had been betrayed by an informer: ‘by the afternoon they were already expecting us. Who guided them to our place? … Spies … cowardly traitors’, he says. ‘Alwan is worried lest one of his comrades was forced to inform on his friends, which could lead to a massacre. This suspicion accompanies the protagonist to the end of the story.58 The theme of betrayal by informers differentiates Farman’s story from Khusbak’s, in which it is less prominent. Farman knew very well that Iraq was crisscrossed by a network of informers who reported to the regime. In a book he published in 1957 in Cairo, al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq,59 he explains how for years the police were informed about students inside schools and clerks at their workplaces, including what papers and books they read and who their friends were. Reports were sent to the managers of the institutions in which those suspected persons studied or worked, and these managers had to dismiss whoever did not toe the regime’s line.60 These practices continued later under Saddam Husayn, who established a state built on informers, even within the family – a state that was well documented by Iraqis and foreigners during the 1950s and later,61 when Iraq truly became a ‘police and spy state’.62 ‘Alwan remembers how, during the Intifada of 1952, which was sparked off by students,63 the authorities had to free criminals and pickpockets to make room in their prisons for students, workers and lawyers.64 Farman’s description of the mass arrests is accurate, since during the Intifada the authorities arrested thousands of people, including many who had no connection to any of the political parties.65 Farman describes the events of the Intifada of November 1952 in a very detailed manner; he tells of the people who were released from jail, those who went into jail, their professions. Iraqi writers in the 1950s were very sensitive towards the changes that occurred in society and in Iraq in general and thus described the events in detail,66 but in Farman’s case his knowledge is also based on personal experience. On 22 November 1952 a series of violent political protests began; the ICP was one of the most prominent opposition parties, if not the most prominent, to take part in organising and carrying out the demonstrations. Clashes with the police ended with dead and injured civilians and numerous 79

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arrests.67 On 24 November 1952, two days after the protests began and on the very same day that the new prime minister, Nur al-Din Mahmud, declared martial law and banned demonstrations,68 Farman himself was arrested. In al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq Farman presents the injustices committed by the Iraqi regime. He explains the circumstances in which the Intifada took place and describes the people who were arrested exactly as he does in his story. It appears that the Abu Ghraib detention camp was filled with party members, lawyers and politicians such as Kamil al-Chadirchi, head of the National Democratic Party, poets such as Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (1900–97), and a great number of students, intellectuals, merchants and workers.69 Farman thus clearly used his own experience as a background for his story ‘Sa’a 12’, and as an instrument of authentication he placed real historical events in the story. These autobiographical elements in ‘Sa’a 12’ reinforce the meaning and significance of the events, which are supported by documentation in history books. They show the great commitment of communist authors of that time to their ideology: The communist intellectuals emerging from the ranks of the ICP now distinguished themselves significantly from other intellectuals in that they had become professional revolutionaries who were committed ideologically to their cause to the degree that they were prepared to face incarceration and possible death70

exactly like the protagonist in Farman’s story. Also, the descriptions of life in jail as reflected in ‘Sa’a 12’ are very similar to the conditions described in al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq. The students in these two stories reflect the realities in the lives of the politically involved. They care about the future of Iraq and choose to act for its sake in an active way, as implied by the fact that on the wall in Farman’s story there was a picture of Ja’far Abu al-Timman, a supporter of activism,71 and as also shown explicitly by the very acts of the protagonists. The students’ decisiveness and enthusiasm is clear from their actions and sayings.72 They feel that they are part of Iraq’s future, since ‘Iraq of the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a public sphere that was inspired by a literary and cultural renaissance on the one hand and growing social and political unrest on the other’.73 This atmosphere is manifested in Farman’s story, as 80

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the characters combine their love for Iraq and their desire to sacrifice for it with their intellectualism, a combination symbolised by the map of the country that hung on the wall where the students’ secret meeting of the took place, together with the books in the same room.74 We may thus say that the Iraqi authorities were quite aware of the power inherent in schools, which they closed whenever the leaders perceived themselves to be under threat.75 The same goes for university students, who have always been a centre of innovative thought, including in politics. The young were a source of constant political unrest, manifested in strikes, demonstrations and also more minor political activities in Iraq, which made the relationship between them and the regime complicated, to say the least. It is worth mentioning that most of the figures in the stories and the authors themselves are Shi‘a, or of Shi‘a origin; also, Abu al-Timman (1881–1945) was the first major Shi‘a public figure in Iraq. Taken together with the way Abu al-Timman is depicted in the story, that is to say as an admired leader, all this may hint at the way the figures view their Shi‘a identity: this identity is not expressed in sectarian terms, which they abhor, but rather in secular and civic terms, which they deemed proper for Iraq. What strengthens this assumption is the fact that Abu al-Timman was known for his efforts to dampen the flames of sectarianism in Iraq and for his good relations with the Sunna.76

The Figure of the Policeman In his memoirs, ‘Aziz al-Hajj, a former member of the ICP, describes the ‘barbaric oppression’ of the Iraqi police until 1949.77 In Khusbak’s ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ we find realistic depictions of this oppression, as the police chase the students on horseback and beat them with the handles of their rifles and their batons and spurs, while the frightened young students run through the street.78 The rift between the powerful police on horseback and the students on the ground transmits a message of dissonance between the two forces. The strong gendarmes use unequal and disproportional force against the weak demonstrators. The police also beat up perplexed and terrified elderly people with their batons and shout ‘close your stores, you dogs’. They are pictured as arrogant and cruel, beating helpless innocent old men as they desperately try to 81

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close their stores. Whoever hesitated or delayed the closing of his store was kicked and brutally beaten.79 The police are also pictured as having no respect or responsibility for the lives of others, causing pain and agony to very old men for no reason in a barbaric and violent manner, and turn the street into a river of blood which men and women, old and young, cross with screams of terror. The panic that they spread among people is compared to the fear of the Day of Resurrection, as a calamity. According to Wahid’s mother, the police are criminals and monsters, because of which she is extremely frightened for her son.80 Eventually they come to Wahid’s home. They knock violently on the door and ask rudely about Wahid. Trying to placate them, the father tries to understate his son’s importance by telling the senior policeman that Wahid, ‘your slave’, has not come home yet. The policeman with the threatening face does not believe the father, and the other officers scatter the furniture and shout, behaviour that later leads Wahid to see them as criminals. During a second search the senior officer pushes the father violently, shouts at him and orders him with a rough tone to hand over his son. Only when they beat the father on his back and are about to take him hostage until Wahid shows up, thus combining physical and mental torture, does Wahid jump out of his hiding place, and the policemen kick and push him with extreme cruelty.81 The policemen in Khusbak’s story are pictured as sadists, with no respect for human dignity, abusing their position of authority to pour scorn on the elderly as well as on the young. In Farman’s story ‘Sa’a 12’ the policemen also shamelessly and indiscriminately shoot at innocent young men who are running in the streets, surrounded by smoke and blood.82 The Iraqi police had already in fact shot demonstrators earlier than the period discussed in the story. In 1946, for example, the police killed ten strikers who were gathering to hear a report from the strike committee.83 The behaviour of the police in Farman’s story is highlighted by the poem ‘al-Bab al-muda’’ (‘The Lighted Door’) by ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati (1926–99) in which he describes how security forces murder communists during a demonstration – ‘And the dead friends are like the water of a surging river that pours forth’84 – as a routine crime committed by the authorities. The suffering caused by the police is a prominent component in Farman’s ‘Sa’a 12’ as well, as it accompanies Wahid’s each and every move. 82

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He was hurt so badly that he can neither hear properly nor walk, nor does he recognise Mahmud and Sabiha, who stand by his bed, although they are his relatives. He cannot concentrate and understands only a little of what is said. The police bullet luckily only scratched his nape, but caused him great pain and a fever. He thinks about his friends who were caught and brought to the police cellars, and imagines with pain how their nails will be torn out and cold water poured over their naked bodies. He knows what they are going through since he himself had been taken to a foul police station full of insects during the Intifada.85 In order to illustrate the extensive use of torture by the police, the author chooses to ironically describe the peaceful moments in the dungeon at the times between one torture and another in Abu Ghraib detention camp.86 From the absence of screams at times of no torture, we learn about the sounds that frequently fill the air when torture does take place. This peacefulness is deceiving, since the silence changes into screams very quickly, as soon as a new torture begins. The authenticity of the depictions of torture in Khusbak’s and Farman’s stories is given credence by memoirs describing the physical and mental torture of political prisoners. In his memoirs ‘Aziz al-Hajj describes the torture of the communists in the police dungeons in 1953 and the arrest of relatives in order to put pressure on them, in addition to starvation and slaughter inside the prison walls.87 As early as 1932 King Faysal I declared that he expected the army to be able to crush two revolutions taking place in two distant locations at the same time, should such demonstrations occur.88 This shows the important role that the king and his successors gave to the Iraqi security forces in internal affairs, and can explain the prominence of the police in Khusbak’s and Farman’s stories. The policemen in these stories are depicted as extremely violent, even sadistic; when they are not using exaggerated physical power they are rude, arrogant and tend to use mental torture.

Conclusion This examination of the stories by Khusbak and Farman reveals the changes that occurred in the way Iraqi society viewed the role of the state, its institutions and representatives. While the previous generation viewed 83

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the state as a powerful entity that managed the country, the young generation of the 1940s and 1950s abandoned this view. During the 1940s, as people became more involved in politics and more enthusiastic and eager to initiate change, the regime reacted ever more harshly; conversely, the more violent the government’s reaction, the more politically involved society became. As the two stories in question suggest, during the 1940s and 1950s young students adopted an active approach to political life. They played a crucial part in Iraq’s future and were prepared to suffer torture and death for the cause, namely to make the state serve the citizen and not vice versa, through adopting secular and civic ways of thought rather than sectarian ones. Awareness, consciousness and political involvement became the prominent keywords of the last years of the monarchy, and so strikes and demonstrations raged throughout the country. When these stories are read and compared with testimonies and memoirs from Iraq of the following decades, one finds that the seeds of dictatorship and political persecution had already been sown in the monarchic period, although they grew immensely in the republican era. By depicting the tense relationship between state and society and by documenting the role of intellectuals and intellectuals-to-be, that is to say the younger generation, especially university and high school students, alongside the birth of Iraqi political activism, Khusbak and Farman paved the way for writers from later periods, which saw no less cruelty. In fact they foresaw the bloodshed that was going to take place against opposition members from the 1960s on. Using the literary corpus as an archive gives us a significant window through which we can study the evolution of political involvement in Iraq. In the present case, this research tool gives us a genuine perspective as to how intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century perceived social and political events, how they expected the authorities to function in these particular events as well as in the broader sense of conducting a state and lastly, how these intellectuals saw themselves becoming integrated into such a state.

Notes 1. Muhsin al-Musawi, Naz’at al-Hadatha fi al-qissa al-‘Iraqiyya (Baghdad: al-Maktaba al-’alamiyya, 1984), pp. 29–30, 45, 80–1. 2. Ariel I. Ahram, ‘Exiles to Iraqi politics’, MERIA 9/1 (2005), pp. 70–82, 70.

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‘THE GOVERNMENT IS THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE’ 3. Shakir Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’, in ‘Ahd jadid (Cairo:  Maktabat Misr, 1951), pp. 183–201. 4. Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’ [1957], in Alam al-sayyid Ma’ruf (Beirut:  Dar al-Farabi, 1982), pp. 141–54. 5. ‘Aziz al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil: safahat min ta’rikh al-haraka al-shuyu’iyya fi al-‘Iraq (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1993), p. 70. 6. Robert B. Campbell, A’lam al-adab al-’Arabi al-mu’asir: siyar wa-siyar dhatiyya (Beirut:  al-sharika al-muttaHida li-l-tawzi’, 1996), pp. 546–9; Muhsin al-Musawi, Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (London:  I.B.Tauris, 2006), p. 120. 7. Ahmad Fawzi, Ashhar al-muhakamat al-suhufiyya fi al-‘Iraq (Baghdad: Matba’at al-intisar, 1985). 8. Yusuf Karkush al-Hilli, Ta’rikh al-Hilla, al-qism al-awwal (Najaf:  al-maktaba al-Haydariyya, 1965), pp. 181, 183, 199–200. 9. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001), pp. 41–2; Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, pp. 56–70; Rahim ‘Ajina, al-Ikhtiyar al-mutajaddid: dhikrayat shakhsiyya wasafahat min masirat al-Hizb al-shuyu’i al-‘Iraqi (Beirut: Dar al-kunuz al-adabiyya, 1998), pp. 29–30; Shamran al-’Ajli, al-Kharita al-siyasiyya li-l-mu’araḍa al-‘Iraqiyya (London: Dar al-Hikma, 2000), pp. 283–301. 10. Majid Khadduri, Independent Iraq (London:  Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 275. 11. See http://www.althakafaaljadeda.com/khe9bag_shaker.htm (accessed 17 February 2015). 12. Zuhayr Shulayba, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman:  Dirasa muqarina fi al-riwaya al‘Iraqiyya (Beirut: Dar al-kunuz al-adabiyya, 1996). 13. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, p. 37. 14. Muhsin al-Musawi, ‘The sociopolitical context of the Iraqi short story, 1908– 1968’, in Eric Davis and Nicholas Gavrielides (eds), Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture (Miami, FL: Florida International University Press, 1991), pp. 202–27, 202–3. 15. Campbell, A’lam al-adab al-’Arabi al-mu’asir, pp.  1046–7; Wiebke Walther, ‘Farman, Ga’ib Tu’ma (1927–90)’, in Julie S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (eds), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London and New York:  Routledge, 2010), pp. 221–2; Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 88–104; Khalid alMisri, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman:  Harakat al-mujtama’ wa-tahawwulat al nass (Beirut: al-Mada, 1997); ‘Ali Ibrahim, al-Zaman wa-l-makan fi riwayat Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman (Damascus:  al-Ahali li-l-tiba’a wa-l-nashr wa-l-tawzi’, 2002); Ahmad al-Nu’man, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman: Adab al-manfa wa-l-Hanin ila alwatan (Beirut: al-Mada, 1996); Usama Ghanim, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman: al-Haḍir fi al-dhakira al-dhahabiyya:  qira’a nassiyya susiyulujiyya (Amman:  Azmina,

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16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

2009); Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 130–1; al-Musawi, Naz’at al-Hadatha fi al-qissa al-‘Iraqiyya, pp. 335–40; Shulayba, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman. Majdi Wahba, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Beirut:  Librairie du Liban, 1974), pp. 525–6; Azriel Ukhmani, Contents and Forms, vol. 2 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv : Sifriyat poalim, 1986), pp. 267–8. Faysal Darraj, al-Waqi’ wa-l-mithal: musahama fi ‘alaqat al-adab wa-l-siyasa (Dar al-fikr al-jadid, 1989), p. 130. Shmuel Moreh, ‘An outline of the development of modern Arabic literature’ [1975], in Studies in Modern Arabic Prose and Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 62–87, 80–1; Ami Elad-Bouskila, Sifrut Aravit bi-levush ‘Ivri (Arabic Literature in Hebrew Garb) (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, 1995), pp. 19–20; Bashkin, The Other Iraq, pp. 88–9. Hilla Peled-Shapira, ‘“Permitted and forbidden”  – conventions of relations between the sexes and their contravention as reflected in the novels of Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman’, Middle Eastern Studies 49/3 (2013), pp. 402–13; Moreh, ‘An outline of the development of modern Arabic literature’, p. 82. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, pp. 89–90. Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq:  A  Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 607. Johan Franzén, Red Star over Iraq:  Iraqi Communism before Saddam (London: Hurst & Company, 2011), p. 40. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, pp. 607–8. Ibid., p. 629. Franzén, Red Star over Iraq, pp. 39–40. Kamal Dib, Zilzal fi arḍ al-shiqaq: al-‘Iraq 1915–2015 (Beirut: al-Farabi, 2003), p. 72. Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: the Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 175–6, 239. Abd al-Razzaq ‘Abd al-Darraji, Ja’far Abu al-Timman wa-dawruhu fi al-haraka al-wataniyya fi al-‘Iraq (Baghdad:  Dar al-Hurriyya li-l-tiba’a, 1980), p.  359; Husayn Jamil, al-Hayat al-niyabiyya fi al-‘Iraq wa-mawqif jama’at al-Ahali minha 1925–1946 (Baghdad:  Maktabat al-Muthanna, 1983); Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, pp. 293–4. al-Musawi, Reading Iraq, p. 112. ‘Aqil al-Nasiri, al-Jaysh wa-l-Sulta fi al-‘Iraq al-malaki 1921–1958 (Damascus: Dar al-hisad, 2000).

86

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37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 103. Ibid., p. 110. Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 103. On election manipulation in the 1930s and the antagonism it aroused, see: Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 84. For the 1950s, see the memoirs of Ahmad Mukhtar Baban, the last Iraqi prime minister of the monarchy alongside Nuri al-Said, where he states, contrary to the stories discussed in this chapter, that the government did not interfere with the election process, which according to him progressed ‘naturally’. Nevertheless, sometimes there was some ‘guidance’ or ‘advising’ (tawgih) in order to prevent unwanted elements from gaining control over the parliament (Kamal Muẓhir Ahmad, Mudhakkirat Ahmad Mukhtar Baban akhir ra’is li-l-uzara’ fi al-’ahd al-malaki fi al-‘Iraq (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-’Arabiyya li-l-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1999), p. 228). Al-Nasiri, al-Jaysh wa-l-Sulta fi al-‘Iraq al-malaki 1921–1958, p. 83. According to al-Nasiri the army had already become the real authority in Iraq in practice in the 1930s, even though it did not have a firm social base in the beginning (ibid., p. 95). Nevertheless, according to other estimations Nuri al-Said had no wish to strengthen the army in the first place (Gerald de Gaury, Three Kings in Baghdad: The Tragedy of Iraq’s Monarchy (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), pp. 146–7). All in all, in the Intifada of November 1952, for the first time since World War II, the army was brought out from the barracks into Baghdad in order to protect the regime (Kaẓim al-Musawi, al-Haraka al-’ummaliyya fi al‘Iraq 1945–1958 (Sweden: Dar al-kunuz al-adabiyya, 1996), pp. 160–1, 167); Michael Eppel adds that the regime was in fact dependent upon the army (Michael Eppel, Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny: from the Hashemites to the Rise of Saddam (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), p. 113). Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. Ibid. Ibid. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Ibid. Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Ibid. From an interview which the present author conducted with the late Iraqiborn journalist Murad al-’Imari in April 2001 in Jerusalem. Matthew Elliot, ‘Independent Iraq’:  The Monarchy and British Influence 1941–1958 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996), p. 104. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, pp. 43–4; Eppel, Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny, p. 128; Elliot, ‘Independent Iraq’, p. 100.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 49. Eppel, Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny, pp. 121–4. 50. Ibid., pp. 138–9; Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, pp. 163–5. 51. al-Musawi, ‘The sociopolitical context of the Iraqi short story, 1908–1968’, p. 203. 52. Ibid., p. 213. 53. ‘Abbas Baghdadi, Baghdad fi al-’ishrinat (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1999), pp. 32–3. 54. Franzén, Red Star over Iraq, pp. 55–8; Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, pp. 75–83. 55. Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. 59. Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman, al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq (Cairo: Dar al-fikr, 1957). 60. Ibid., p. 50. This assertion by Farman receives support in ‘Aziz al-Hajj’s definition of police wukala’ mundassun (hidden agents) within the ranks of the ICP (Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, p. 57). 61. ‘He was a prisoner named Abbas, an Iraqi. He’d been here four years, ever since his brother turned him in for criticizing Saddam’; ‘Journalists who’d covered Baghdad before the war told me that Iraqis were more open with them than with members of their own families. Saddam had created a population of informers. The system penetrated to the home, to the kitchen table, just as it did in Nazi Germany. Ahmad said it would require a generation of cleansing’ (Bob Simon, Forty Days (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992), p. 194). See a similar comparison between the spies of the Iraqi regime of 1952 and the Gestapo’s spies in Nazi Germany: jawasis al-Ghistabu (alMusawi, al-Haraka al-’ummaliyya fi al-‘Iraq 1945–1958, p. 161; ‘Abd Jasim, al-Dhakira wa-l-hanin fi al-qissa al-‘Iraqiyya al-qasira fi al-manfa (London: al-Rafid, 1996), p. 61; Sulayman Ibrahim al-’Askari, ‘al-Muthaqqaf al-‘Iraqi min al-Hisar al-siyasi ila al-manfa wa-l-mawt’, al-’Arabi 511 (June 2001), pp. 8–13, 9). 62. Salim Fattal, In the Alleys of Baghdad (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Karmel, 2003), pp. 310–11. 63. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, p. 43; Eppel, Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny, pp. 109, 111–13; al-Musawi, al-Haraka al-’ummaliyya fi al-‘Iraq 1945–1958, pp. 158–62. In this Intifada, too, the protesters called to punish the spies who tracked the students (ibid., p. 159), as described in Farman’s al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq (1957); some had the impression that the communists were able to overturn governments by means of these riots (Elliot, ‘Independent Iraq’, pp. 95–6). According to Batatu, the students, who had been on a non-political strike for a few days, merged with street vendors, craftsmen and workers who ‘sprang into action’ in that Intifada

88

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

(Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 668). Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, pp. 122, 135–6. Al-Musawi, Naz’at al-Hadatha fi al-qissa al-‘Iraqiyya, p. 111. Franzén, Red Star over Iraq, pp. 62–3. Elliot, ‘Independent Iraq’, p. 101. Farman, al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-‘Iraq, p. 35. Franzén, Red Star over Iraq, p. 63. Abd al-Razzaq ‘Abd al-Darraji, Ja’far Abu al-Timman wa-dawruhu fi al-haraka al-wataniyya fi al-Iraq (Baghdad: Dar al-Hurriyya li-l-tiba’a, 1980), p. 5. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 104. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Eppel, Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny, p. 139. ‘Abd al-Darraji, Ja’far Abu al-Timman wa-dawruhu fi al-haraka al-wataniyya fi al-‘Iraq, p. 498. Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, p. 133. Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’. Ibid. Ibid Ibid. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, p.  39; Khadduri, Independent Iraq, p. 274. ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, ‘al-Bab al-muḍa’, in al-A’mal al-shi’riyya, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dar al-faris li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzi’, 1995), pp. 304–6. Farman, ‘Sa’a 12’. Ibid. Al-Hajj, Dhakirat al-nakhil, pp. 103–5, 119–22, 136–8.

88. Al-Nasiri, al-Jaysh wa-l-Sulta fi al-‘Iraq al-malaki 1921–1958, pp. 34–5.

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4 Education Policy in Iraq, 1921–58: Competing Visions of the State Hilary Falb Kalisman

Government-sponsored schooling in Iraq functioned as an important factor in the Iraqi state’s formation and composition, and as a site of conflicting perceptions of the role of that state in society. From the consolidation of British control of the region, through the overthrow of the Hashemite dynasty, schooling reflected and exacerbated local, sectarian, national, international and colonial concerns. British officials sought to limit education, particularly the teaching of English and secondary education, in order to prevent the growth of an academically educated unemployed. Iraqi-citizen policy makers fought with the British and amongst themselves to realise goals of national unity, development and the betterment of particular groups within Iraqi society based on familial, political and sectarian affiliations. Parents naturally hoped educational achievements would grant their children a better life, frequently as employees within the government bureaucracy. Debates surrounding the role of education in Iraq, with some exceptions, tend to focus on a few key policy makers and their prolific writings. There are few scholarly works in English that focus on education in Iraq exclusively.1 Many broader histories analyse government schooling in the context of political and social changes during the monarchy.2 Other historians concentrate on the military specifically, or the rise of a militarist 90

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culture.3 There are also several works written by contemporary experts on education whose concerns include which type of education was best for Iraqi society.4 However, the main questions that inform accounts of education in Iraq during the Hashemite period are ones of nationalism and the unrealised promise of a democratic or liberal Iraq. Historians have been driven in part by an analytical concern with the development of the nation state and explanations of the rise of Saddam Husayn. On the other hand, officials at the highest levels of Iraq’s educational bureaucracy were explicitly concerned with education and its connection to the nation, conceived in a variety of ways. This chapter expands these narratives by focusing on how government education reflected and shaped the changing relationships between the Iraqi state and society, rather than simply the development of an Iraqi nation (or lack thereof). It draws upon reports and other materials produced by the British administration of Iraq, the Ministry of Education, memoirs, oral histories, the Iraqi Government Gazette and archival materials from Lebanon, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. By analysing educational policies and personnel, including but not limited to the upper echelons of the educational bureaucracy, this chapter underscores competing perceptions of the role of the Iraqi state in society, and the way education facilitated connections between the two.

1918–23 Even before the official end of World War I, having occupied Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, the British military administration turned its attention to formulating and implementing an educational policy for the conquered territories under its control. The varied backgrounds and experiences of educational officials and the unstable nature of the government itself, meant Iraqi citizens and British officials constantly fought over how and how much to educate the Iraqi population. The British, in accordance with the Hague conventions regarding military occupation, were required to preserve Ottoman laws, public safety and to take over the functions of the Ottoman government, including Ottoman government schools.5 Reopening schools also constituted a carrot to the stick of martial law.6 For British educational officials, the 91

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purpose of government schooling was colonial in nature, namely to facilitate control of the population as cheaply as possible. The first report of the Department of Education in Iraq, written in 1918 by Humphrey Bowman, then Director of Education, argues for the need to restrict secondary education. It advocates teaching only as much English as would be necessary to train local clerks to staff the growing bureaucracy (thereby avoiding the high cost of foreign employees) and to quiet the demands of the population for English-language instruction.7 British reports describe constant petitions for classes in English throughout Iraq, as even a scant knowledge of the language of the new rulers could lead to a clerkship, or other ‘commercial purposes’.8 Bowman’s aim, and that of many of his peers, was to use schooling to prevent the migration of rural youth to urban areas, where there would be few opportunities for employment and many opportunities for anti-British nationalism.9 Referencing Indian rebellions and the Egyptian Zaghlulist revolts, Bowman and his peers viewed the English language, higher education and an academic rather than vocational focus as clear dangers to their rule. They feared the growth of an Iraqi effendiyya class of urbanite, Western-dressed, educated individuals that would seek independence.10 British policy makers’ chosen solution was to require teaching of English in primary rather than elementary schools, and only in urban areas.11 The military government planned to limit higher education to an arts and crafts school, an agricultural college and a ‘shaikhs college’ to cater to the ‘son of the Arab of the best class’, who would modernise and sedenterise their communities.12 The presence of government institutions of higher education, both civilian and military, during the Ottoman period forced the British to reopen some of these schools. In Baghdad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Ottoman government had founded a civilian preparatory and high school for boys, a high school for girls, four elementary schools, two military institutions and a law school.13 By 1922 in Baghdad, there were two Teachers Colleges, one for female and one for male teachers (which would play a key role in disseminating views of Iraqi educational policy makers), a law school, an engineering school, a technical school, and a military college to train cadets.14 Military education had offered an avenue of social mobility for lower-class Ottoman Muslims. Civilian government 92

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schools provided a means of class consolidation as well as some degree of social mobility for middle and upper socioeconomic groups, as did missionary and religious schools for different denominations.15 The connection between education and government service meant colonial policies restricting education, as well as the appointment of nonIraqi-born officials, exacerbated conflicts within the educational system, in turn shaping educators’ concerns. Bowman had recently arrived in Iraq from Egypt, as had his assistant; they both favoured the importing of Egyptian textbooks, personnel and educational structure to Iraq.16 In his memoirs, Sati al-Husri, an Ottoman-Arab pedagogue and key figure in the history of Iraqi education, thought it was obvious that the educational system the British imposed was in fact ‘imported’ wholesale from Egypt.17 The lack of educated individuals throughout the country led to the employment of Egyptian as well as Syrian and Lebanese teachers. By 1918 even the teacher training institute in Baghdad, which had been staffed and run by ‘Syrians’, was headed by an Egyptian ‘selected by the Egyptian government for the post’.18 Many locals disliked the appointment of non-Iraqi-born individuals to higher posts within the educational system. Sati al-Husri, born in Yemen to a Syrian family, and Director of Education in 1920, describes an anonymous petition sent to the Iraqi prime minister, published in the Iraqi press in 1922. This petition questioned whether the Iraqi government was Iraqi or Syrian due to the number of Syrian teachers employed in the educational system. The petition, which al-Husri thought was instigated by principals and an inspector in Baghdad, claimed that al-Husri had personally engineered the dropping out or failure of 60 out of the 75 students in Baghdad’s secondary school in order to claim their teachers were incompetent and replace them with Syrians.19 From the military and through the Mandate period, al-Husri used his authority to expand and improve education in part as a means of inculcating pan-Arabist Iraqi nationalism while advancing Iraqi society. His curriculum focused on Arab/Iraqi history and Arabic. He hoped to educate girls as well as boys.20 He hired those who were in his view most qualified to teach, in order to unify and train Iraq’s schoolchildren.21 Rancour at the exclusion of local educators from the educational system (and in part at al-Husri’s high-handed style) illuminates how and why education 93

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functioned as a site of contestation. Conflicts with al-Husri led petitioners to complain that the educational system was geared towards political considerations, leading them to request not an apolitical system of schooling, but one in which they represented a greater share. Arguing over who could be integrated into the educational bureaucracy was in part a debate over who could claim government authority, and to some extent what an Iraqi government, or indeed an Iraqi, meant. Local observers made this point clear in their criticisms of the colonial nature of British educational policies and the employment of foreigners within the educational bureaucracy. Yasin al-Hashimi, twice prime minister of Iraq, complained that British emphasis on elementary education might produce ‘good farmers and good engineers but in fifty years’ time we shall be no further forward in obtaining a class of highly educated men fit to take over the government of the country’.22 Al-Hashimi’s criticisms also highlighted British efforts to limit higher education, preventing the production of an educated unemployed but also, as al-Hashimi explained, of non-British leaders. Jafar al-Askari, also twice prime minister of Iraq, noted in his memoirs that the first civil commissioner of Iraq claimed that ‘not a single individual could be found among the entire Iraqi population suitably qualified for the administration of the country’.23 Al-Askari countered by describing the ‘many Iraqis who had distinguished themselves in administration, politics and the army in the various Arab countries’.24 He blamed the denial of his entry, as an educated and well-trained Iraqi, into the country on the ‘administrative methods applied in Iraq combined with the mentality and ambitions of a government of India officials who were clearly bent on the annexation of Iraq to India as a colony.25 For al-Askari, British policies, and the favouring of non-Iraqis, were a frank denial of his own right to govern.

1923–32 By the end of World War I the Mandate system had supplanted overt colonial conquest in favour of a paternalistic notion of trusteeship.26 The costly revolts of 1920 led British policy makers to conclude that Iraq was to be put on a quick road to a semblance of independence.27 As they cast around for which departments to relinquish to local jurisdiction, they settled on 94

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education. From 1923 on, the battle for control over schooling shifted to Iraqi citizens, while increasingly frustrated British officials played an advisory role. The Iraqi state at its upper levels by no means represented Iraqi society.28 However, secondary schooling was one of the few ways different groups of Iraqis could compete over some measure of government authority. A high school education was necessary to serve in the government, rendering the few Iraqi high school graduates the only qualified pool for government posts.29 A continued lack of secondary schools meant those who attended civilian government schools at the secondary level or above had a stake in governance, as it was presumed their qualifications would allow them to be part of the government.30 Personal, professional, national and sectarian concerns defined the educational bureaucracy, and the government as a whole. Al-Husri’s memoirs document numerous tirades against various government officials, ranging from teachers to ministers. For example, al-Husri claimed the Minister of Finance had sought to remove him from office by cleverly citing a need to economise and by arguing the ministry should be staffed by born-Iraqis. The king intervened, as he was no more Iraqi-born than al-Husri, granting al-Husri the title of ‘Director General of Education’, which al-Husri noted gave him even more control over educational affairs. Al-Husri also derided the Minister of Education, Abdul Hussein Chalabi, for being basically illiterate, and for meddling in educational affairs under the influence of a ‘Persian secretary’.31 In the end, al-Husri appealed to the prime minister who forced Chalabi to fire the secretary and to replace him with an ‘Iraqi’ one, ending al-Husri’s complaints.32 In his memoirs, al-Husri cites personal or professional grievances in his criticisms of other education officials. However, Chalabi’s greatgranddaughter asserts that al-Husri’s motivations were purely sectarian. Her grandfather, the barely literate Minister of Education, was a Shi‘a notable and a token Shi‘a in Iraq’s parliament; presumably, his ‘Persian’ secretary, who may have been more Iraqi than al-Husri, was also Shi‘a. She argues that conflicts beyond and within the educational system led her great-grandfather to expand educational opportunities for the Shi‘a, including ensuring his son graduated from the law college, as he believed that participation in governance was the main way to improve his sect’s 95

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status.33 Similarly, the Minister of Finance, Sasson Heskel, was Jewish.34 Heskel angered al-Husri by seeking to divert educational funding from purely government schools to those that catered specifi cally to the Iraqi Jewish community.35 These nepotistic, and to some degree sectarian, divisions within the government demonstrate how each group fought to improve their position, and that of their family, tribe or sect. Within the government bureaucracy, shared desires for schooling did not lead to unity or even concord, particularly as al-Husri’s academic goals often clashed with those of other educators. Moreover, the link between government education and a government job meant those who were excluded from the one were frequently excluded from the other. The lack of non-government secondary schools and their focus on Iraq’s poorer or religious minority populations increased the importance of government schools as feeders for the civil service. There were two full nongovernment secondary schools and six intermediate schools by 1932–3, in comparison to four full government secondary schools and 18 intermediate schools.36 British officials asserted that students from non-government schools tended to be better prepared for non-government careers, in ‘business and commerce’.37 This meant Iraq’s minorities often worked outside of the government. The wife of the principal of the American Mission School in Basra noted a class divide in government vs non-government education as well, as ‘the sons of the well to do flocked to the state schools’ seeking careers as lawyers, doctors, teachers and, of course, the higher ranks of the civil service.38 Those who did enter government service through the path of civilian secondary education seldom left it permanently, despite disagreements amongst educational personnel. For example the famous Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri pushed against the limits of free speech, but still worked for the Iraqi government in various capacities. Jawahiri was repeatedly removed, whether on his own volition or that of the Ministry of Education, from 1924 through 1956.39 Technically a Persian citizen until 1927, Jawahiri worked in Kadhimain as a schoolmaster. Al-Husri sacked him, allegedly for publishing a poem that praised Persia. However, the Minister of Education did not think Jawahiri ought to have been fired. After a ‘furious exchange’ of correspondence, Jawahiri was reinstated. The 96

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British read this situation as a Sunni-Shi‘a conflict, as al-Husri was Sunni; Jawahiri was Shi‘a, as was the Minister of Education.40 Jawahiri’s issues within the bureaucracy indicate more than just sectarian loyalties. Personal dynamics played a key part in the functioning of the educational bureaucracy at every level; however, permanent removal from a government post was rare. Through 1941, government education remained a path towards long-term, if not always continuous, employment within the civil service. During the Mandate, as in the military period, educators had differing views of their role in society, as well as who was to be educated and how. Sati al-Husri sought compulsory education, in part as a means of forging a national identity; however, he also prioritised public education’s unifying characteristics, refusing to open schools if he thought they would contribute to sectarian divides.41 British officials hoped for stability, while many other teachers presumably focused on making a living, throughout political and social upheavals. As schooling expanded, so did the ranks of educators as well as the multiplicity of educators’ views towards education and education’s role in Iraqi society.

1932–41 During the 1930s the quality and quantity of Iraq’s education changed. Educational facilities, funding and personnel increased exponentially. Militarism, fascist appreciation and rebellions against these changes permeated the government schools of Iraq. Despite these shifts, schooling particularly at the secondary level and above remained limited and focused in urban areas. This severed Iraq’s rural population from a chance at social mobility and incorporation into the government. The disjuncture between Iraq’s military, its rural, increasingly destitute population and its urban, secondary school graduate civil servants (part of the effendiyya whose rise the British had feared) exacerbated tensions between the state and society. Increases in Iraq’s army during the 1930s contributed to a more military character in government education overall.42 The conscription law, first implemented in 1934, was amended in 1936: students (provided they passed yearly nationwide examinations) were exempted from military service.43 In practice, the combination of exemptions for those who could afford to attend higher education (or who could pay a fee) and the lack of 97

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options for poorer families, particularly in smaller towns and cities, further pushed lower-class boys into military service, either voluntarily or through conscription.44 In contrast, the civilian education system, mainly beyond the first six years of schooling, continued to cater to a more elite social group.45 A clear division between military and civilian institutions perpetuated the links between government schooling and the civil service. This division paved the way for military figures to intrude politically, in a series of coups between 1936 and 1941. Those educated in civilian secondary schools were still assured a place in the civil service, even as a small group of parliamentarians reshuffled according to army officers’ preferences. As this group circulated ministerial positions amongst themselves, they also moved in and out of power and in and out of government employment.46 Throughout Iraq conditions for rural Iraqis and non-elites were dire; they also generally lacked access to educational facilities that made it difficult if not impossible to gain government positions.47 By the 1938–9 school year, students from the districts of Dulaim, Kut, Sulaimaniya and Nasiriya would have had to travel to a larger city to receive a secondary education, as would girls from anywhere except Mosul or Baghdad.48 Unless these students had relatives or other friends in areas with secondary schools they would have to pay for their accommodations, which further restricted secondary education to those who could afford to live near the schools. Therefore, the pool of individuals possessing either the necessary qualifications and/or connections to complete a secondary education and enter government service was generally from a comfortable socioeconomic background. The urban distribution of education, and the difficulties rural and poor students faced, meant that civil servants, including teachers, were overwhelmingly from cities.49 Administrators as well as teachers were frequently transferred, distancing state representatives from the society they were meant to educate or represent. Matta Akrawi, an American University of Beirut (AUB) graduate and educational official, asserted that the Iraqi government was ‘filled by townsmen whose background is very different from that of the tribal and rural population. All of this naturally results in a cleavage between the governors and the governed, both socially and politically’.50 98

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Akrawi’s criticisms of the division between rulers and ruled notwithstanding, he was born to a prominent family in Mosul and maintained a post in government service across multiple regimes.51 Akrawi did not advocate a more representative government, simply a more orderly one. His solution to the issue of urban elites’ ineffective work in rural areas was to advocate the training of rural teachers, who would be experts on health, ‘elementary agriculture’ and gardening.52 Akrawi, and several of his fellow educators, particularly an elite few who had, like him, attended AUB and/or Teachers College Columbia, promoted pragmatist education. They advocated schooling differentiated along rural, urban and gender divides. Their goals tended to clash with al-Husri’s curriculum, as it was nationally applied, and concentrated on academic subjects, the Arabic language and Arab history. Debates over the future of Iraqi schooling and Iraqi society prompted criticisms of Iraq’s educational system, and perhaps honed these pragmatists’ beliefs in the need for more progressive schooling.53 The quality of education these hopeful future governors received shifted during the 1930s as it became infused with increased anti-imperial nationalism and militarism. Many educators, and politicians, publicly advocated a somewhat nebulous notion of Arab nationalism and Arab unity, based on ‘sovereignty, independence, unity, revival, and the means to develop the nationalist spirit’ as well as anti-imperial and anti-Zionist activities.54 This form of Arab unity was tied to militaristic, fascist and pro-Nazi trends during the 1930s. The Teachers College in Baghdad played a formative role in disseminating these ideologies during the interwar period. Sami Shawkat, the Minister of Education, was instrumental in incorporating a ‘Hitler Youth-type paramilitary’ group, the futuwwa, into the elementary and secondary schools of Iraq.55 Joining the futuwwa, which meant ‘youthful masculinity’, was mandatory for students in the secondary and intermediate schools by 1939.56 In 1941, with World War II, the British cracked down on education, both military and civilian, in Iraq, buttressing the Hashemite monarchy and winning a month-long Anglo-Iraqi war. Subsequently the British and the monarchist politicians reinstalled by the British victory changed militant futuwwa’s purpose to developing the students’ ‘love of order and obedience’.57 A political report noted that the war had fundamentally disrupted 99

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Iraqi education, and that there would be ‘a thorough purge of Nazi minded masters and distorted textbooks’.58

1941–58 From the 1940s through to the end of the monarchy and into the republican period education in Iraq became better funded, more widespread and standardised. More and more children shared the nationwide experiences of exams, as well as professionally qualified teachers. The direct link between government schooling and a government job disintegrated as high school and college graduates increased beyond the capacity or desire of the governing cadre to employ them. Moreover, during the 1940s and 1950s most Iraqis who did reach a government post found their salaries insufficient. Soldiers did not receive their salaries consistently. While civilian government education no longer provided an avenue towards government employment, the military continued to offer an alternative approach to seizing power. New funds devoted to education during the 1940s and 1950s, due to greater independence from Britain, and expanded access to Iraq’s oil revenues led to increases in the number of Iraqi students receiving higher education. Secondary schooling no longer ensured a government career, or indeed a career at all.59 Between 1940–1 and 1950–1 the number of secondary schools increased by nearly 70 per cent, while the number of primary schools increased by approximately 50 per cent. Between 1950–1 and 1959–60 secondary education increased by approximately 197 per cent, primary by 187 per cent.60 Advanced institutions, including a university by 1956, meant better-qualified civil servants, while simultaneously reducing the value of lower educational qualifications.61 By the 1960s even university graduates were forced to ‘accept blue collar jobs’.62 Those who did gain a position in the civil service, including educators, saw their salaries reduced, making government employment less appealing in addition to its being less available.63 During the early 1940s, foreign and Iraqi educationalists complained that the Iraqi system, somewhat due to al-Husri’s lingering influence, remained too academic. They blamed the curriculum for creating a surplus of academically inclined civil servants without sufficient vocational schooling for Iraq’s economy and society. 100

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Vocational schools, however, were opened, and higher institutions began to offer a greater degree of specialisation. Teachers’ view of themselves and their relationship to different strata of Iraqi society shifted as well. Educators, other civil servants and the effendiyya as a whole, began to participate more and more in mass protests, particularly as part of the Iraqi Communist Party. Its calls for social justice resonated with the former middle-class educators.64 In order to deal with their reduced economic circumstances, teachers began to take on extra lessons outside of class time, particularly to help well-off students pass their exams, as salaries were no longer sufficient. Government-sponsored exams began during the first years of British control in an attempt to improve standards, but also to prevent too many students from gaining secondary credentials.65 However, under the careful eye of Sati al-Husri, the purpose of exams had shifted to function as a means of centralising education and unifying schoolchildren’s studies and, it was hoped, national affiliation. Exams also regulated the curriculum and student’s political leanings nationwide. By the 1940s nearly all of Iraq’s schoolchildren could expect to take at least one, at most three, government exams, although the failure rate was extremely high.66 The nearly universal experience of studying and taking exams in Iraq forged a bond among school-aged children across Iraqi society, and allowed the government to intrude even further into the lives of its youngest subjects. Khalid al-Kishtaini recalled a ‘wonderful atmosphere’ before exams, as he and his peers crammed away for two to three months before the exams took place.67 Students flooded Baghdad’s cafes, taking breaks from their study only to listen to the news on the radio, while drinking tea and ordering snacks. Sassoon Somekh, an Iraqi Jew and later Israeli intellectual, risked punishment by writing an overtly anti-imperial exam essay in 1949. Government interest in the content of examination essays indicates a new, more intimate relationship between the Iraqi state and Iraqi children. Somekh asserted Iraq had been a British colony and had now fallen under the ‘influence of American imperialism’.68 The jibe at American influence clearly pegged Somekh as possessing Communist leanings, which could be punished with imprisonment. However, the lead official examining the essay, himself a poet, commended Somekh’s writing and shook his hand.69 Somekh’s principal warned him that he should refrain from writing such 101

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opinionated essays in the future, not only for the sake of Somekh’s safety but also that of the school.70 In the face of government surveillance, increasing numbers of teachers and other civil servants, as well as a reduction in the salary and status of teaching, a group of male and female teachers from all levels of schooling in Iraq founded the Iraqi Teachers Association in 1944.71 The goals of the organisation indicate how educators viewed the state of their profession, and their own relationship to the government and the society they served. Teaching was no longer prestigious or highly paid. The association advocated professionalism, solidarity and improved standards of living. The group also vowed to raise the concerns of teachers to the government while defending their moral and material rights (presumably from that same government). Teachers’ clubs would facilitate communication between educators and the Ministry of Education, indicating that teachers needed a collective front to bring their concerns to the ministry, whereas in earlier years they could simply write a petition.72 They resolved to set up a fund to take care of members and their families who were in need of assistance, showing that the government’s pension plan was insufficient for many teachers and their families’ needs.73 The association vowed to help train teachers to improve their society by eradicating illiteracy and disseminating health education among the masses of the people in towns, villages and the countryside, underscoring continued difficulties in health and literacy. The association’s platform overall indicates that teachers no longer saw themselves as part of a detached bureaucracy. The Iraqi government frequently targeted the Iraqi teachers’ union, not just because of its general political activity but mainly because many of its members were assumed (often correctly) to be communists.74 Moreover, many teachers were increasingly involved in protests during the late 1940s and 1950s due to the decline in their material standing and frustration with the government. As secondary education no longer functioned as a clear link to the government, more and more individuals, either within or outside of government service, began to participate in anti-government protests. This period of mass education and mass protest was short-lived. The officers who seized control in 1958 exemplify the social mobility an army education and career could bring underprivileged Iraqi youth, as they were from a range of backgrounds, from lower to upper classes.75 102

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Conclusion From World War I through the early 1940s government education promised a means of gaining access to government authority and prestige. Various groups fought amongst themselves for greater representation in schooling, and in the hope of gaining a stake in the government itself. They offered conflicting views as to who should be part of the Iraqi state, but generally all agreed that public education would facilitate incorporation into government service (whether they wanted it to nor not). However, as education became more widespread, office-seekers overwhelmed the number of offices available. As those jobs became less profitable or secure, it created grounds for political and social unrest. By the 1960s, contradictory perceptions of the Iraqi state, and its connection to society (or lack thereof) began to converge. Iraq’s military regimes implemented a rigid educational system that reduced variety of educational goals and programmes individuals had promoted during the monarchical period. While the population was better educated overall, education no longer meant a clear path to state employment.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was funded by fellowships from The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, the Sultan Program of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California Berkeley and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Notes 1. Orit Bashkin, ‘When Muawiya entered the curriculum: some comments on the Iraqi education system in the interwar period’, Comparative Education Review 50/3 (2006), pp. 346–66; William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Sara Pursley, ‘The stage of adolescence: anticolonial time, youth insurgency, and the marriage crisis in Hashimite Iraq’, History of the Present 32 (2013), pp. 160–97; Sara Pursley, ‘Building the nation through the production of difference’, in Jordi Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco and Hamit Bozarslan (eds), Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), pp. 119–41.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 2. Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq:  Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2009); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (New  York:  ACLS History E-Book Project, 2005); Eric Davis, Memories of State:  Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 2005); Adeed Dawisha, Iraq:  A  Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2009); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘as of Iraq (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1994); Liora Lukitz, Iraq:  The Search for National Identity (London; New  York:  Routledge, 2006); Reeva S. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). 3. Mohammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1982); Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932– 1941 (London: Routledge, 2006). 4. Matta Akrawi, ‘Curriculum construction in the public primary schools of Iraq in the light of a study of the political, economic, social, hygienic and educational conditions and problems of the country, with some reference to the education of teachers. a preliminary investigation’, PhD dissertation, Teachers College Columbia, 1942; Victor Clark, Compulsory Education in Iraq (Paris:  Unesco, 1951); Nuri Abdul Salam al-Hadifh, ‘A plan for the in-service education of high school teachers in Iraq’, PhD dissertation, Teachers College Columbia, 1951; Muhammad Fadil Jamali, The New Iraq: Its Problem of Bedouin Education(New York:  Teachers College Columbia, 1934); Mohammed Hussain Yasin, ‘Education for all Iraqi youth: reorganization of secondary education in Iraq’, PhD dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1947. 5. A. Pearce Higgins (ed.), The Hague Peace Conferences and Other International Conferences Concerning the Laws and Usages of War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1909). 6. Hanna Batatu, ‘Iraq’s underground Shi‘a movements: characteristics, causes and prospects’, Middle East Journal 354 (1981), pp. 578–94; British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), IOR L/PS/10/816  ‘Education in Mesopotamia. Department of Education budget estimates 1920–1’, File 1454/1919, London 1921; BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/10/816, Humphrey Bowman, ‘Education remarks Mosul’, London, 1919–20; Dorothy Van Ess Papers (DVEP), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1966–75), 78-M124, folder 32, ‘Pioneers in the Arab world’, revised draft.

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EDUCATION POLICY IN IRAQ, 1921–58 7. Humphrey E. Bowman, ‘Administration reports for the year 1918 of certain departments of the civil administration of the Occupied Territories of Iraq’, in Alan de L. Rush and Jane Priestland (eds), Records of Iraq, 1914–1918, vol. 1 (Slough: Archive Editions, 2001). 8. BL, IOR, OR/L/PS/10/816, File 1454/1919, ‘Education in Mesopotamia. Administration report:  Kirkuk’, 1919 and ‘Report on education in Karbala’, 1919. 9. Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, 1918–1948, 16 vols, 1929– 1931, vol. 3 (Slough: Archive Editions, 1995), p. 65. 10. Robert L. Tignor, ‘The “Indianization” of the Egyptian administration under British rule’, The American Historical Review 68/3 (1963), pp. 636–61; Humphrey E. Bowman, Middle-East Window (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1942), p. 311. 11. Humphrey E. Bowman, ‘Department of Education, annual report 1918, 20 of January, 1919’, in Rush and Priestland, Records of Iraq. 12. IOR/L/PS/10/816, ‘Education in Mesopotamia. Department of Education budget estimates 1920–1’. 13. Gökhan Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908 (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 17; Abdul Latif Tibawi, Islamic Education: Its Traditions and Modernization into the Arab National Systems (London:  Luzac, 1972), p. 84. 14. Great Britain, Colonial Office, Special Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Progress of Iraq during the Period 1920–1931 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1931), pp. 158–9, 209–15. Available at http://www.llmcdigital.org/default.aspx?redir=98096 (accessed 1 July 2015). 15. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 9. 16. BL, IOR, IOR/L/PS/10 ‘Mesopotamia: administration: personnel’, File 517/6, 1920; Bowman, Middle-East Window, p. 191 17. Abu Khaldun Sati al-Husri, Mudhakkirati Fi Al-‘Iraq 1921–1941, vol. 2, 2 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’ah, 1967), p. 108. 18. Bowman, ‘Department of Education, annual report 1918, 20 of January, 1919’. 19. Al-Husri, Mudhakkirati Fi Al-‘Iraq 1921–1941, pp. 249–52. 20. Pursley, ‘Building the nation through the production of difference’, p. 125. 21. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist, p. 64. 22. Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, p. 32. 23. Ja’far Askari, A Soldier’s Story:  From Ottoman Rule to Independent Iraq:  The Memoirs of Jafar Pasha Al-Askari (1885–1936), ed. William Facey and Safwat Najdat Fathi, trans. Mustafa Tariq al-Askari (London:  Arabian Publishing, 2003), pp. 174–5. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 26. Nele Matz, ‘Civilization and the mandate system under the League of Nations as origin of trusteeship’, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9 (2005), pp. 47–95. 27. Abbas K. Kadhim, Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 1. 28. Ayad Al-Qazzaz, ‘Power elite in Iraq – 1920–1958: a study of the Cabinet’, The Muslim World 61/4 (1971), pp. 267–83. 29. Dyala Hamzah (ed.), The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880–1960): Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 221. 30. Roderic D. Matthews and Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the Near East:  Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon (Washington, DC:  American Council on Education, 1949), p.  140; Great Britain, Colonial Office, ‘Special Report’, p. 232 31. Al-Husri, Mudhakkirati Fi Al-‘Iraq 1921–1941, pp. 263–6, 272–3. 32. Ibid., p. 275. 33. Tamara Chalabi, Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family (New York: Harper, 2011), pp. 113–14. 34. Beth Dougherty and Edmund Ghareeb, Historical Dictionary of Iraq (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), pp. 262–3. 35. Al-Husri, Mudhakkirati Fi Al-‘Iraq 1921–1941, p. 263. 36. Wizarat al-Ma arif, Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi ‘an Sayr Al-Ma’Arif 1933–32 (Baghdad: Republic of Iraq, 1932), pp. 37, 71–3. 37. Great Britain, Colonial Office, Great Britain High Commissioner for Mesopotamia League of Nations Council Report by His Britannic Majesty’s Government to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Iraq for the Year 1928–1929 (New York, 1929) p. 137. 38. DVEP, ‘Pioneers in the Arab World’, revised draft. 39. Dougherty and Ghareeb, Historical Dictionary of Iraq, p. 123; BL, IOR, IOR2/ 20/A/1238, Intelligence Report No. 9, Baghdad, 29 April 1926. 40. Dougherty and Ghareeb, Historical Dictionary of Iraq. 41. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist, p. 67. 42. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, pp. 26, 30; Dawisha, Iraq, p. 37. 43. DVEP, file 33, Dorothy Van Ess, ‘The American Mission School for Boys, Basrah Iraq’, 1953. 44. Ibrahim Salama and Sammy al-Marashi, Iraq’s Armed Forces:  An Analytical History (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 37–40. 45. Paul Monroe, Government of Iraq, Report of the Educational Inquiry Commission (Baghdad: Government Press, 1932), p. 72 Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century:  From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 73.

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EDUCATION POLICY IN IRAQ, 1921–58 46. Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics. 47. Abd al-Karim Uzri, Tarikh Fi Dhikrayat Al-‘Iraq, 1930–1958 (Beirut:  Markaz al-Abjadiyya li al-Saff al-Taswiri, 1982), p. 28. 48. Uzri, Tarikh Fi Dhikrayat Al-‘Iraq. 49. Rashid Salbi, ‘Some of the problems of the school, between the principal and the teachers’, al-Mu’allim al-jadid 6 (1940–1), pp. 224–8. 50. Akrawi, ‘Curriculum construction in the public primary schools of Iraq’, p. 36. 51. Dougherty and Ghareeb, Historical Dictionary of Iraq, pp.  81–2; The Iraq Government Gazette, No. 39, 29 September 1929, CO 813/3, The National Archives, London; The Iraq Government Gazette, No. 47, 24 November 1935, CO 813/9, The National Archives, London. 52. Matta Akrawi, ‘Fundamental education for the Arab world’, Akrawi, Matta II Reports, AA6, American University of Beirut Archives and Special Collections, 1951. 53. Pursley, ‘Building the nation through the production of difference’. 54. Akram Zu’aytir, Bawakir Al-Nidal: 1909–1935 (Beirut:  al-Muassasat al-’arabiyyat li-l-dirasat wa-al-nasr, 1994), p. 693. 55. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 103. 56. Pursley, ‘The stage of adolescence’, p. 178. 57. The Iraq Government Gazette, No. 45, 9 November 1941, CO 813/16. 58. British Embassy, High Commission and Consulate, ‘Iraq: correspondence: situation reports (political officers), Part I, ‘Political reports on situation in Iraq’, 1941, The National Archives, London. 59. Joel Mokyr, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 154; Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 138–9; Bernard Reich, Political Leaders of the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 470–2. 60. Office of the Cultural Attaché, Embassy of Iraq, Education in Iraq (Washington, DC: Office of the Cultural Attaché, Embassy of Iraq, 1957); Wizarat al-Ma arif, Development of Education During the Third Year of the Revolution, 1960–1961 (Baghdad: Republic of Iraq, 1961). 61. New York Times, 1 April 1956, p. 2. 62. Hassan A. Kufaishi, ‘Education as a vehicle for national development in Iraq’, PhD dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1977, p. 5. 63. F.R.C. Bagley, ‘Iraq to-day’, International Journal 12/3 (1957), p. 202. 64. Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 269. 65. Irak Report on Education 1922/23, S T 34/15, British Library London. 66. Bassam Yousif, Human Development in Iraq: 1950–1990 (London:  Routledge, 2012), pp. 68–9.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 67. Interview al-Kishtaini, 12 December 2011. 68. Sasson Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2007), p. 78. 69. Abd al-Razzaq Ani Ayif Habib Khalil Hilali, Tarikh Al-Ta’Lim Fi Al-‘Iraq Fi Al-‘Ahd Al-Intidab Al-Baritani, 1921–1932 (Baghdad, al-‘Iraq: Wizarat alThaqafah wa-al-I’lam, Dar al-Shuun al-Thaqafiyah al-’Ammah, ‘Afaq ‘Arabiyah’, 2000), p. 418; The Iraq Government Gazette, No. 45, 10 November 1946, CO 813/22, The National Archives, London. 70. Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday, p. 80. 71. Hassan al-Dajili, ‘The Teachers’ Association’, al-Mu’allim al-jadid 8 (1942–4), p. 271. 72. Ibid., pp. 271–2. 73. Ibid., p. 271. 74. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 934. 75. Ibid., pp. 778–83.

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5 Military–Society Relations in Iraq, 1921–58: Competing Roles of the Army Ibrahim Al-Marashi

The relationship between Iraq’s army and society during the monarchy was defined by a set of traumas experienced by its political elites, which subsequently resulted in this elite inflicting traumas on segments of Iraq’s society, justified in the name of forging the modernising, nationalist institution of the military. These elites, who witnessed or fought during World War I, viewed the newly formed Iraqi military as an institution that could rectify the traumas they had experienced, including the French invasion of a shortlived independent Arab kingdom in Syria, the Anglo-French role in formation of borders that severed pre-existing social ties between Iraq and Syria and Britain’s role in allowing the emergence of a Jewish state in the Arab world. A pan-Arabist vision evolved in Iraq, articulated in response to the aforementioned events; however, not all of Iraq’s elite embraced this vision, prioritising the consolidation and development of the Iraqi nation over extraterritorial concerns. While the elites either adopted Iraqi nationalism, Arab nationalism or a fusion of the two, they did task the military with the consolidation of the state by attaining a monopoly on organised violence against well-armed tribes, Kurds, and a local air force to end its reliance on the Royal Air Force. In the process of creating a national Iraq army, they hoped that it would serve as an institutional bulwark against British influence in Iraq. Yet to achieve this mission the military itself inflicted trauma upon other Iraqi 109

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communities, either compelling citizens to join the armed forces through conscription, or coercion against rebellious elements of the population via aerial bombardments or conducting indiscriminate massacres. British colonial authorities developed the institutions of the Iraqi monarchy, including a parliament, bureaucracy, military and national education system. This chapter, read in conjunction with Hilary Falb Kalisman’s on the Iraqi education system (Chapter 4), demonstrates similarities in the Iraqi perception of both institutions and a similar process of development. For Iraqis to assert their independence from Britain and join the League of Nations it would have to develop the trappings of European statehood. The military and education were essential to this goal. Yet both Iraqi officers and intellectuals were critical of the poor quality of their armed forces, asserting that Britain had deliberately created a national military with just enough personnel and weapons to secure British control over Iraq, but not strong enough to allow Iraq to emerge as a regional hegemon and unite the various Arab states, never mind quell the internal threats posed by Kurdish rebels and tribal revolts. When Iraq introduced conscription, expanding the ranks of the military, the army endorsed various anti-imperialist ideologies and called for independence from British control, just as the Iraqi education system allowed a space for similar sentiments. Indeed, as this chapter will demonstrate, the interaction between the military and society occurred in the realms of education, both military and civilian, forming a rather symbiotic relationship with soliders and national and transnational intellectuals. In the imaginative realm, including the media, education and political discourse, the Iraqi military evolved as a site of contestation of identity and citizenship, where competing politicians, educators, intellectuals and officers hailed the army, projecting anti-imperial, and local or regional nationalist aspirations onto it. Elites that inculcated adulation for the military supported militarism in military colleges to elementary school education, often in a pan-Arabist paradigm, and its curricula often neglected the identity of Iraq’s Kurds and other ethnic minorities. Despite the elite’s aspirations for the military to emerge as an inclusionary national institution, it was a body whose leadership was contested, either by rival officers, with differing ties to Iraqi society, eliminating one another through assassinations and military coups, or by its use of violence 110

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to coerce religious minorities or tribes on the periphery. Throughout the entire duration of the monarchy, the military, a body that was to foster loyalty to the Hashemite dynasty of King Faysal I, was contested by Iraqis with competing national and social priorities and personal agendas. While the military and conscription did not transcend Iraq’s societal differences to forge an institution with a shared national vision, members of the Iraqi military defied orders from the governmental authorities by interacting and mingling with social clubs and political movements that characterised the nation’s nascent civil society and public sphere.

Conceptualising the Role of the Military in State–Society Relations Past works dealing with the interaction between the military and society are often situated within the literature of civil–military relations, linked to the modernisation theories of the Cold War. Political scientists such as Huntington, Janowitz and Perlmutter, during a time of coups in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East from the 1950s to the late 1970s, compared the role of the military in these states against an ideal type, the military in the liberal states, depoliticised and subordinated to civilian authority.1 Following the defeats of the Iraqi military in 1991 and 2003 a new direction in the literature developed on military effectiveness in the region, including analyses of how Middle Eastern armed forces perform during times of interstate war. Risa Brooks and Kenneth Pollack examine how the warmaking capacity of Arab militaries has been undermined by regional armed forces’ preoccupation with civilian economies and politics, in addition to regime security, where political elites sought to weaken the military to prevent it from launching a coup d’etat.2 These two strands in the literature focus on an inherent contrast as to why Middle Eastern militaries do not fit the normative model of American or European civil–military relations, as militaries in the developing world that were designed to defend the nation from external threats, emerged as agents of domestic coercion. While this chapter examines how the army policed and compelled segments of Iraq’s society during the monarchy, this practice is not ahistorical or exceptional in Europe or the US. The literature on civil–military relations often compares military systems across nations in the present. Yet, in 111

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a historical context, even the US military coerced its own society, including during the American Civil War and the federal military’s suppression of the 1863 New York draft riots, or the National Guard’s role in countering university student protests during the Vietnam War. Second, military effectiveness is also contingent on historical experience. European and Western armies were just as ineffective during World War I compared to the performance of the Iranian and Iraqi armies during similar battles of the Iran–Iraq War. In terms of the literature on the interaction between the Iraqi military and society, Hanna Batatu’s monumental work covers the development of the Iraqi military from the monarchy to 1970, Tarbush specifically focuses on the military’s role from 1921 to 1941 in the formation of the Iraqi state, Salih continues this analysis from 1941 to 1958, while Simon deals with the Iraqi military and education under the monarchy.3 The author’s own earlier volume focused on its numerous military coups and its battle history with Israel, Iran and the US in 2003.4 These works focus primarily on political and military elites. The missing perspective in these works, particularly my co-authored volume, has been the failure to incorporate the views of the lower ranks, conscripts and draft dodgers. This lack of perspective is often due to the paucity of primary sources produced by these groups. However, this bias has been addressed in regard to Iraq’s recent past. Khoury situates the Iraqi state’s military coercion of society through the lens of the history of violence during the decades of war from 1980 to 2003,5 providing perspectives of both the conscripts and the victims of military-sponsored violence, an element that has been missing in the literature of the Iraq’s armed forces. While not directly dealing with the Iraqi army, two works provide contextual histories of the social milieu in which the military officers interacted and the emergence of militarism in Iraq’s public sphere. Orit Bashkin’s The Other Iraq examines Iraq’s public sphere during the monarchy, revealing how the military figured in the imaginative, intellectual and ideational realms.6 Peter Wien analyses Iraqi memoirs and print media before 1941, crucial in understanding militarist tendencies and the times that produced them.7 Both are valuable in examining militarism in Iraqi print media and public discourse, which became a space for the adulation or criticism of the military and militarism. 112

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The Foundation and Formation of the Iraqi Military During World War I the British-inspired Arab Revolt declared by Sharif Husayn of Mecca resulted in a cadre of Ottoman officers defecting to the Sharifian cause, with some originating from the Ottoman provinces that would later make up Iraq. Other Iraqi officers stayed loyal to the Empire to its end. Regardless of their loyalties during the war, these officers joined Sharif Husayn’s son Faysal when he established himself in Damascus as head of a short-lived postwar Arab kingdom, commanding its military.8 After Faysal was ejected from Damascus by French forces in 1919 keen to establish their own mandate in Syria, the British chose him to serve as a monarch for their recently established Mandate of Iraq. The officers who had served Faysal in Damascus moved with him to Baghdad, forming the political elite of the Iraqi monarchy. After suppressing the 1920 national revolt against British rule in Iraq, the UK sought to secure its mandate with a local government acceptable to the population, with an indigenous military. With these objectives in mind, the Iraqi Army and the Military College were inaugurated in January 1921.9 Under the mandate, Britain fostered the Iraqi military as an institution to defend the new state from emerging regional hegemons, Turkey and Iran, and act as a colonial enforcer, suppressing any anti-government and antiBritish activities in the country.10 The veterans of the Ottoman army, who originated from the provinces that would later make up Iraq, possessed the prerequisite military training to serve the new monarchy. They happened to be Arab, Kurdish and Turkish Sunni Muslims from the Iraqi provinces of the Empire, as the Shi‘a of Iraq during the Ottoman era were less likely to chose the military as a profession. The Iraqi monarchy inherited a de facto sectarian imbalance in the officer corps compared to the demographics of the new state. The earliest evidence of King Faysal addressing this issue and imagining the military as a national, inclusive institution was bestowing names such as the Imam Musa Kadhim Battalion upon one of Iraq’s infantry units.11 The use of a revered Shi‘a figure, buried outside of Baghdad, ostensibly sought to increase the number of volunteers among the Arab Shi‘a, close to half the population, addressing the problem of the low, voluntary recruitment rates. 113

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However, fewer than 4,000 Iraqis voluntarily joined the army during the early monarchy.12 Jafar al-Askari, a former Ottoman-turned-Sharifian officer, served as Iraq’s first Minister of Defence and introduced a plan in 1922 to overcome low recruitment rates by creating a conscript army.13 Conscription sought to forge citizenship by cementing the public’s loyalty to a standing army that would incorporate Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities, as well as urban, rural and tribal elements. Elites like al-Askari believed that the loyalty to Hashemite Iraq would be imbued into the soldier, inculcating nationalist values as new recruits developed an esprit de corps, moulding a new model Iraqi citizen who, after his military service, would take those ideals into civilian life. Conscription would simultaneously deliver a tactical benefit to the nascent state. By drafting tribesmen of fighting age into the military it would undermine the tribes’ potential to resist the government, with their own arsenals at their disposal and tendency to ally with British interests. Al-Askari introduced the conscription bill to the Iraqi parliament in June 1927.14 Representatives of Shi‘a and Kurdish tribes in parliament feared that their authority would be weakened, as their most able fighting men would be subsumed into the military. A  Kurdish Member of Parliament declared: ‘All Kurds are against conscription.’15 A Shi‘a member of the cabinet resigned in protest.16 A council of Shi‘a tribes issued a statement declaring:  ‘Our sect only is to bear the burden’, and referred to conscription as a ‘catastrophe’.17 The predominantly Shi‘a Al-Nahdha Party opposed the bill. The Shi‘as’ memory of the coercive and lengthy nature of Ottoman conscription saw the new effort as a means to coopt their community into the lower ranks of a military.18 The politicians’ rhetoric appears as a debate framed within ethno-sectarian contours, but the information about this session is partly gleaned from British documents, and some of their authors superficially reported on Iraqi affairs in sectarian terms. Second, objections that corresponded along sectarian and ethnic lines obfuscate objections to conscription in terms of power politics. Sluglett illustrates how the tribes refused to exclude generations of their men of fighting age from serving in a body that would later employ military coercion to erode their autonomy.19 Due to the objections to conscription, both domestic and British, this measure was temporarily abandoned. 114

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Contested Nationalisms and the Military During its formative years the Iraqi military emerged as a site of tension between ideological currents within Iraqi society, local Iraqi nationalism and pan-Arabism. The ‘Iraqist’ (wataniyyun) camp, whose primary loyalty was to an Iraqi state, is traditionally juxtaposed in the literature of Iraq’s history with the Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists (qawmiyyun), a group who envisioned Iraq’s growing military power propelling it on a path of an Arab Prussia that would unify other Arab states that had been divided into mandates by the British and French governments after World War I. To achieve this goal, Sunni Arab officers, part of an ethno-sectarian minority within Iraq, gravitated to pan-Arabism, a revisionist movement that would rectify the boundaries dividing the Arab nation and unite Iraq with a region that also happened to be primarily Arab Sunni. From an ethno-sectarian perspective, as Sunni Arabs officers and instructors they would have rationally sought to overcome their minority status in Iraq by linking their nation’s identity with that of the greater Sunni Arab world. This ideological dichotomy assumes that officers and lower ranks were products of these nationalist trends forming in society, passively absorbing ideas expressed in the media or intellectual clubs and, based on these convictions, they overthrew Iraq’s governments to implement their vision of where the nation should fall in between these two camps. Bashkin demonstrates the various nuances of pan-Arabism when analysing Iraq’s public sphere during the monarchy, and how pan-Arabism could be adapted and re-appropriated to buttress the nationalist visions and legitimacy of even rival political factions.20 In her analysis, the manner in which officers communicated and the hybrid ideologies they adhered to in the process of societal coercion and adulation should be acknowledged as fluid and not predetermined by sect, ethnicity or rigid political categories. As for the political leadership of the monarchy, rather than a binary opposition of Sunni versus Shi‘a, Arab versus Kurd or Iraqi nationalist versus Arab nationalist, it would be more apt to describe the ideology and societal interaction of the state’s politicians with Iraqi soldiers, political agitators and intellectuals as a continuum, where the Iraqist elites would appropriate pan-Arabist language and pan-Arabists would invoke Iraqist 115

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language simultaneously, while sharing a common antipathy to British influence in the country. Officers adhered to or combated these ideologies out of convenience or genuine conviction, regardless of their ethnic or sectarian background and, furthermore, could experiment with a variety of ideologies in their military career, abandoning one out of disillusionment, or simultaneously pursuing a hybrid of ideologies. Arab Sunni officers, while seeking to protect the power of an Arab Sunni monarchy, happened to share a common sectarian background but formed rival factions manoeuvring to seize power for themselves, which ultimately undermined the stability of this Arab Sunni regime. In terms of the Iraqi national education system in its earliest forms, it depicted the army emerged as a symbol of national unity and Arabism, particularly under the aegis of Sati al-Husri, the Director-General of Education from 1923 to 1927. Al-Husri, who hailed from Aleppo, also joined the short-lived Arab kingdom in Damascus and then moved with Faysal, along with the other Iraqi military officers, to the newly founded Kingdom of Iraq. He crafted the curricula that portrayed the Iraqi army as an ‘Arab army’, first liberating Iraq from British control, then forging a panArab state, as the Prussian army had with the various disjointed German states to form Germany. In order to achieve this goal the Iraqi Army would serving as a socialising body, imbuing in a new soldier-citizen a cause greater than his ethnic or sectarian group.21 In a 1928 magazine article, ‘Social Development’ (al-tarbiyya al-ijtima’iyya), he wrote: He lives with a group of the sons of the country, who are drawn from different towns and who hold various beliefs and positions. He lives with them, subject to a system in which they are all included without exception.22

Those students who graduated from schools during al-Husri’s tenure and then joined the army brought into the institution an identity not solely concerned with the independence of Iraq but with the unity of all Arab states, freed from British and French control. Sami Shawkat, al-Husri’s successor, had served in the Ottoman military and like al-Husri, then joined Faysal in the Arab kingdom in Syria. In both national education and intellectual clubs Shawkat perpetuated al-Husri’s vision of Iraq as the Arab Prussia whose military would unite the Arab 116

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mandates.23 In his speech, ‘The Art of Death’ (Sana’at al-Mawt), delivered to an audience of students and teachers in Baghdad in 1933, he advocated a militant form of patriotism where a strong leader would command a nationalist army in a struggle for independence and progress of a resurgent Arab nation.24 Shawkat founded a system of paramilitary education at the secondary school level in 1939, the Futuwwa, which served as a reflection of the martial symbolism in education.25 Wien’s work provides a gendered aspect of militarism in Iraqi society. As the military sought to forge national unity it was inherently an exclusive, male-dominated enterprise. However, women tried to negotiate their role in the growing militarism as society, with female intellectuals seeking to project a feminine role in the defence of Iraq by advocating a female version of the Futuwwa.26 The Iraqi media served also emerged as a space to foster pro-military sentiments, and even the satirical paper Habazbuz praised the military.27 Shawkat used Iraq’s print media to communicate his militarist tendencies. In an article in 1939 he wrote: ‘We want war. We should shed our blood for the sake of Arabism and the Arabs. We should die for our national cause. We should be impregnated with military spirit.’28 While such language has been considered as evidence of fascist leanings in Iraqi society, it could be found in the pre-fascist work of the Filippo Marinetti’s ‘The Futurist manifesto’, published in 1909.29 Wien’s work reveals that the language of alHusri and Shawkat, situated in a greater Iraqi nationalist discourse, while authoritarian and militarist, sought to emulate common Asian or regional examples, either Japanese or Turkish Kemalist models of military-political and societal relationships, and Shawkat himself rejected German militarism.30 Finally, not every Director of Education, or teacher, for that matter, inculcated militarism or adulation of the military as the identity of the educational apparatus was in flux, as it also was within the military. Similar strands of militarism could be found in the Iraqi Military College. A graduate of the college recalled how his military history professor, Tawfiq Husayn, described Iraq as the Arab Prussia, with an emerging military force that could establish a ‘great Arab state’, restoring the Arab nation’s ‘past glories’.31 Husayn instructed his students about the potential of Iraqi army’s contribution to pan-Arab nationalism, but before it could achieve this goal it had to reorient Iraq’s politics away from British 117

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tutelage.32 Husayn’s students included officers such as Bakr Sidqi and Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh, both of whom would take part in a series of military coups from 1936 to 1941.33 Societal dynamics and fluctuations during the formation of Iraq affected a generation of officers rising through the ranks, including a cell of young officers around al-Sabbagh. His fellow colonels included Fahmi Said, an Arab from the Anbak tribe, inhabiting the areas from Sulaymaniyya to the northern Tigris River. Mahmud Salman and Kamil Shabib were Arabs from Baghdad. All four came from modest Arab Sunni, middle-income, mercantile families. These four Sunni Arab officers had served in the Ottoman military to the end, and then joined the army of Faysal’s kingdom in Syria. They were all present in Syria when the Arab kingdom came to a violent end at the battle of Maysaloun.34 Based on al-Sabbagh’s memoirs, this event hardened his belief that the British had allowed the French to destroy this first genuinely independent Arab state. To add insult to injury, Britain failed to deliver on its promise to Sharif Husayn of a future Arab nation that would include Iraq, Syria, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.35 These four officers returned to their ancestral Iraq and joined the new Iraqi Army. They saw this institution as a vehicle to achieve Iraqi independence from Britain, and then to liberate Syria and Lebanon from French mandatory control and the contested Palestine Mandate from the British.36 These officers not only sought the erasure of the Syrian–Iraq border but sought also to resolve the issue of the Palestine Mandate, the most pressing danger at the time to a future imagined unified Arab nation. In al-Husri and Shawkat’s vision, military, paramilitary and civilian education equated nationalism with the expansion of the military, and eventual unity of the Arab world through conquest. Officers like al-Sabbagh and his fellow colonels also adopted an anti-imperial imaginary where the army would create the Iraqi nation free from British tutelage, and the Iraqi military would then create a greater Arab nation. Both these instructors and career officers, who had experienced a fleeting moment of an independent Arab kingdom in Damascus, imagined the military of Iraq could recreate that short-lived moment. Even if the leader of that kingdom in Damascus, Faysal, had died in 1933, it could be achieved under his nationalist son, Ghazi, or by themselves after Ghazi died in 1936, by taking over the government through a military coup. 118

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While this teleological vision follows a pan-Arab trajectory, embedded within it was a form of local Iraqi Arab nationalism, by comparing Iraq to Prussia and arguing the supremacy of Iraq’s large population, natural resources and growing army among other Arab states. In this vision, the Kurds or other ethnic minorities had been excluded, as they were to be either passive communities, an inconvenient fact, or Arabised, and in the case of the Assyrians, physically disciplined to assimilate within an Iraqi state dedicated to either Arab reunification or anti-imperialism.

The Military as Internal Discipliner and Mass Mobilisation Institution In the early state formation process of the 1920s British authorities had recruited Levies from the Christian Assyrian population in Iraq to maintain internal security, outnumbering the troops of the Iraqi Army.37 In the growing anti-imperial milieu of the 1930s the Assyrian Levies were viewed by elements of Iraqi society as a tool of British domination, even when this unit was disbanded after Iraq’s independence in 1932. In the following year, army forces under Colonel Bakr Sidqi deployed to the north of Iraq to deal with an alleged Assyrian insurrection. After Sidqi’s soldiers engaged armed Assyrians and defeated them in a relatively minor skirmish they went on to massacre at least 600 Assyrian civilians in the village of Summayl.38 This attack raised the army’s public stature as well as that of its commander, Bakr Sidqi, serving as the first instance where the Iraqi military could boast of an anti-imperial success on behalf of the nation. Crowds in Kirkuk and Baghdad took to the streets to cheer the military’s actions.39 The attacks were supported by both Iraqi nationalists and social democrats.40 An observer of the crowds, the son of Sati al-Husri and so not impartial, wrote of the euphoria that filled the streets on the news of the Iraqi military’s actions.41 Addressing adoring crowds in Mosul, the then premier, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, declared: ‘Yes, the army should be strengthened in order that it should protect our honour.’42 The military and sympathetic politicians celebrated this national victory at the cost of exclusion of another Iraqi community. In the context of rising anti-British sentiments in society, political elites seized the moment to re-introduce the conscription law, using the event as a justification of the need for an expanded military. 119

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Societal cleavages, not necessarily sectarian or ethnic, and the monarchy’s desire to overcome those cleavages, shaped the Iraqi army, from its commanding officers to its influx of conscripts. The conscripted came from the lower classes, unable to send their sons for education in Iraq or abroad or pay the exemption fee known as the badal. Conscription led to an influx of young, untrained men into the military, from predominantly Kurdish and Shi‘a peasant families, aged 19 and above, who were not enrolled in higher education. In these cases, elements of society sought to exclude themselves from what was hoped to be an inclusionary body, resulting in high desertion rates or even escape from Iraq to avoid the draft.43 The army was initially envisioned as an inclusive voluntary association in the monarchy’s quest to achieve a monopoly on the use of force, as it would not only curtail the tribes but also prove that Iraq had obtained the requisite status to achieve independence and join the League of Nations. As recruitment levels remained low, elements within Iraq’s political elite imagined the military as an institution that could reconcile societal fragmentation through conscription, thereby creating the image of societal ownership of one aspect of the state, the national army. While elites intended the armed forces to emerge as inclusive institution, forging a national Iraqi homogeneity over a heterogeneous society, the state paradoxically enforced conscription, a mandatory national obligation, thereby coercing elements of society that sought to resist joining the army. While the conscription law passed in the parliament in June 1935, it continued to arouse objections from Iraqi communities. Media that criticised militarism or called on citizens to resist conscription were outlawed or censored.44 The Yazidis, a syncretic faith community in the areas around Jabal Sinjar and north of Mosul, had resisted the application of conscription from their tribes.45 Shi‘a and Kurdish tribes feared that conscription would undermine their social structures.46 While only 25 per cent of officers were of tribal origin, the tribesmen would eventually provide up to 75 per cent of the rank-and-file.47 This imbalance proved problematic when tribal conscripts were deployed against their fellow tribesmen in the 1935 revolt in the mid-Euphrates area, leading to high desertion rates from the army. A year later Sidqi was also charged with quelling this domestic threat with heavy artillery and the Royal Iraqi Air Force. The societal implication of these tactics has been described as: ‘The state through its dependence 120

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upon air power not only became detached from society but also hung two hundred feet above it, bombing people when they did not behave in the way the state wanted.’48 The Iraqi military had successful managed to adopt the early Royal Air Force policy of the 1920s of aerial coercion. During this revolt the military also had the right to censor print media.49 Coercion thus took the form of creating punishments for print media resisting militarism or criticising the military in it attempt to pacify the periphery into submission. At the time of this tribal revolt, half of the Iraqi military was stationed to deal with another episode of internal unrest in the north among the Kurds.50 The Iraqi Kurdish uprising, led by Shaykh Mahmud Barazani, began after the promise of an independent Kurdish state after World War I  had been reneged on, as were subsequent British assurances that they would be granted an autonomous region and administration within an Iraqi state. Unlike in the flat south, coercion from the air against rebels ensconced in the mountains resulted in brief halts in the fighting, but the Iraqi military was never able to ensure a decisive victory. The Assyrian massacres, the mid-Euphrates revolt and the continuous Kurdish uprisings were embedded within the challenging circumstances in which the Iraqi state found itself under the early monarchy. This nascent state envisioned the military as one of the few national institutions that could instil a grand civic ethos, however the military’s role in this regard was enhanced at the expense of the marginalising the Assyrian community. In terms of the Kurdish rebellions, the Iraqi state sought to keep its northern borders intact at a time when it perceived a threat from Turkey, which also laid claim to the same area. To maintain an Iraqi state inclusive of its citizens, it first had to fight for its existence by maintaining control over its national borders, and this paradoxically led to the use of violence to force segments of Iraq’s society to include themselves in the parameters of the new state. The tribes in the middle Euphrates, on the other hand, flush with arms and resistant to conscription, were a body that both presented a threat to the state and could be manipulated by Iraqi politicians and the British to undermine the monarchy. Sidqi’s suppression of this revolt, while successful, emboldened his stature within the military, granting him a prime position to launch a coup. 121

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Societal Cleavages within the Military Elite Overemphasising the role that sect and ethnicity played in the Iraqi military risks invoking a sectarian metanarrative of the Arab Sunni domination of the Iraqi officer corps from the 1920s to 2003. Reducing this corporate body according to ethno-sectarian affiliation alone denies the fissures along generational, ideological and urban–rural divides within the military, while at the same time assuming that Iraq’s Kurds or Turkmens, or Shi‘as and Christian’s were first and foremost discrete communities in and of themselves, and ignoring how members who originated from these communities not only joined this institution from a sense of national belonging, but could rise through its ranks. Furthermore, sectarian determinism neglects the role patrimonial networks, embedded in Iraqi society, played within the military. The networks inhibited the trajectory of developing armed forces along bureaucratic lines, where only the state, through conscription and military education, would shape a new Iraqi citizen. As ex-Sharifians dominated the upper echelons of the military they encouraged younger members from their hometowns or tribes to enlist. Patrons recruited clients through kinship networks, leading to a new generation, connected to the economic changes occurring in Iraq in the 1930s, entering the army. Pan-Arabism in Iraq was influenced by the coterie who were shaped by Faysal’s failed Damascus experience, and concurrently developed in relation to the dislocations caused by the formation of the Iraqi–Syrian border itself. Poorer men from Mosul or towns like Takrit and Rawa, which happened to be primarily inhabited by Arab Sunnis, had suffered from economic decline when the new border between Iraq and Syria cut trading networks between Mosul and its environs to Aleppo, imposing new customs barriers and currencies.51 As the displaced migrated to the capital, there they were encouraged by senior officers from their mutual place of origin to join the military or its academies, and later, on graduation, they formed most of the junior officers. Mawlud Mukhlis, who served in the Ottoman and then Sharifian army, encouraged young fellow Takritis to enlist, such as Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, who later emerged as the figurehead of the 1968 military-Ba‘thist coup. Another ex-Sharifian officer, Ibrahim al-Rawi, Commander of the Fourth Division, encouraged fellow townsmen from Rawa to join.52 While 122

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these informal personal networks within the military happened to fall along sectarian lines, they emerged as a result of rural-urban migration and dislocation, and even though the patrons were Arab Sunnis, this did not necessarily result in a shared confessional identity, but rather rival networks among these officers. During the 1930s, military officers interacted with urban middle-class nationalist intellectuals and professionals known as the Young Effendiyya, graduates of the education system formed after Iraq’s creation. This relationship was at times cultivated by politicians. Al-Sabbagh’s patron in this regard was Yasin al-Hashimi, one of the ex-Sharifian officers, who became prime minister in 1935. Al-Hashimi and al-Sabbagh interacted with social groups like the Muthanna Club, even though military men were legally not allowed to join these groups.53 The civilians in the Muthanna Club found the relationship with al-Sabbagh beneficial as they sought to make the inroads into the military by recruiting officers.54 The club was sympathetic to pan-Arabism, and al-Husri and Shawkat spoke there regularly.55 While it would seem that the pan-Arabism of the Muthanna Club would appeal to Arab Sunnis, Arab Shi‘as, such as Muhammad Mahdi Kubba, were also prominent in the group.56 Other Shi‘a intellectuals during the time also adopted Arab nationalist and militarist discourses in papers such as Al-Hatif,57 demonstrating the analytical failings of viewing Iraq’s history through the prism of sectarian determinism.

The Era of Iraq’s Military Coups At the same time Arab Sunnis in Iraq would establish groups that proved more sympathetic to national Iraqi issues, such as the Ahali Group, a social democrat reformist movement founded by Muhammad Hadid (who happened to be an Arab Sunni from Mosul). The Ahali Group, in fact, often ridiculed the militarist tendencies of Sami Shawkat.58 Yet it was the Ahali Group that put its intellectual weight behind Iraq’s first military coup. The group had the support of the politician Hikmat Sulayman, who was allied with General Sidqi. Their coup plans had societal implications, as the Ahali Group was given assurances that they could pursue their social reform agenda by removing the al-Hashimi government. A coalition comprised of liberal reformers and the military had been formed. 123

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Sulayman and Sidqi’s local Iraqi nationalism rivalled prime minister Yasin al-Hashimi’s pan-Arabist tendencies, yet this ideological rivalry also hid the their aspiration for power, as the pair aspired to higher positions in the government and military command structure, which had been prevented by al-Hashimi. In October 1936, forces under Sidqi’s command advanced towards Baghdad while military planes dropped leaflets demanding that Iraq’s second king, Ghazi, replace al-Hashimi. When Sulayman became the new premier as a result of the coup, he formed a government with allies from the Ahali Group. However, the Group’s reformist programmes, such as the nationalisation of industries, distribution of state-owned land to the peasants and the formation of trade unions, were never realised due to Sidqi’s desire to maintain the status quo.59 The group questioned whether it should have supported a coup in the first place and, while it had supported the army’s massacre of the Assyrians, blaming the events on the British, it objected to the new government’s suppression of Communists, and the Ahali members in the government subsequently resigned.60 The clash between the liberal reformists and this military officer could not be resolved and their resignations demonstrated that Sulayman, as facilitator of the alliance, was ultimately beholden to the military. Al-Sabbagh’s aspirations for the Iraqi military and nation in 1936 are documented in his memoirs, which claim that he sought the overthrow of the Sulayman government as it was dominated by politicians and officers who were Iraqi Kurds and Turks, and thus insufficiently committed to his version of anti-imperial pan-Arabism. Al-Sabbagh’s anti-imperialist credentials are displayed in his allegations that the British desired to use the Iraqi military as a colonial enforcer to crush the Iraqi people and prevent the public from unifying with an army that could serve a pan-Arab nationalist and anti-imperial agenda. In his opinion, it was not the armed strength of the army per se that Britain feared, but rather its symbolic value as an institution that could foster solidarity between soldiers and the Iraqi masses under ‘the flag of Arabism’.61 His memoirs naturally presented an idealised account of his accomplishment as an officer dominating Iraq’s government from 1937 to 1941. He wrote them in exile, seeking to reflect on the glory of his tenure after the British invaded Iraq in 1941 and deposed him. His loyalties and motivations invoke the language of the stark binary oppositions between pan-Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism. Officer 124

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memoirs, which often display either Iraqi national or pan-Arab credentials in launching coups, obfuscate how these ideologies moved along a continuous spectrum and also prompt the question of how personal and less grandiose intentions of any military officer factor in launching a coup – obtaining political power and the ability of its leader and conspirators to enjoy the largesse of the state. While al-Sabbagh may have genuinely held his pan-Arab and ethnic and sectarian biases during the 1930s, it is not possible to glean from his memoirs whether he held those beliefs at that time or simply desired political power or revenge by removing Sidqi, who had unseated his mentor, al-Hashimi, or a combination of all of these factors. In August 1937 al-Sabbagh, in coordination with three of his fellow loyal officers, ordered the assassination of Bakr Sidqi, the military anchor of the Sulayman government, and ended a regime that had lasted ten months. Al-Sabbagh, by virtue of controlling the military, controlled Iraqi politics behind the scenes until he threw his support behind Rashid Ali as the premier, replacing the pro-British prime minister Nuri al-Said. The Rashid Ali government of 1941 has been characterised as an Arab nationalist, pro-German, ‘fascist’ government. While its supporters exhibited authoritarian and militarist tendencies, it was not necessarily fascist.62 However, the power brokers in the government were anti-British, and when it refused to ally Iraq with the UK during World War II, denying the UK’s requests to move ground troops through the country, the British military invaded to overthrow this government. In terms of societal support, al-Sabbagh could rally the Muthanna Club and the Futuwwa cadets. By 29 May, Iraqi military’s resistance faltered, and the British forces were on the outskirts of Baghdad. During the ensuing security vacuum a pro-government mob attacked the city’s Jewish population in a series of events known as the Farhud. However, the military did protect upper-class areas where Jews lived alongside Muslims, and prevented the mob from entering.63 The role the military played is significant, as while the Farhud massacres were tragic, the army as an organisation did not indulge in an action reminiscent of the massacre of the Assyrians, coercing a marginalised population in 1933 to strengthen the military itself. After the war of 1941 the British Military Mission in Iraq purged the military of anti-British soldiers.64 The Mission realised past mistakes in neglecting militarism in public education and sought to undo the work 125

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of al-Husri and Shawkat. British advisors remained in the Iraqi Ministry of Education to ensure that anti-British and militaristic themes in Iraqi textbooks were deleted.65 In 1948 widespread protests erupted, known as the Wathba or ‘The Leap’, protesting a renewed Anglo-Iraqi Treaty that would keep British bases in Iraq. The government, cognizant of past military coups, hesitated to deploy the army against the protestors. Nevertheless, the military was eventually deployed out of necessity, and fired on the crowds.66 Charged to suppress another nationwide protest in 1952, officers sympathised with the protestors.67 A generation of officers had been transformed from 1948 to 1952. The officers by this point primarily consisted of battalion and brigade commanders who had joined the military after Iraq’s independence in 1932 and had been younger soldiers during the days of Iraq’s military coups. They also took part in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, and believed that the monarchy had not provided enough material support to achieve victory over Israel. Inspired by a movement called the Free Officers, who seized power in Egypt in 1952, the underground Iraqi Free Officers movement began to expand. Mahdi Hashim, one of the founders of the Communist Party, wrote of the officers at this time: ‘of the eighty staff officers of the Iraqi army only three come from Shi‘a families, while 90 per cent of the soldiers are sons of the Shi‘a community’.68 Even though Arab Sunnis were predominant among the Free Officers, sect and ethnicity did not determine political allegiance to the parties who had differing political agendas and commitments to societal reform. By the 1950s political parties, like the intellectual clubs of the 1930s, served as the interface between soldiers and society. According to the memoir of Ismail Arif, one of the Free Officers, Arab Sunnis, such as Colonel Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Major Salih Mahdi Ammash, joined the panArabist Ba‘th Party, while other Arab Sunnis joined the Arab nationalist Istiqlal Party (the successor to the Muthanna Club).69 In these cases, Arab Sunnis were willing to join two parties established or led by Arab Shi‘as, demonstrating that pan-Arabism was not merely an Arab Sunni-led enterprise. Through Muhammad Hadid the left-leaning National Democratic Party (the successor to the Ahali Group) cultivated ties with his friend Abd al-Karim Qasim, who was of mixed Sunni-Shi‘a, Arab-Kurdish descent.70 Despite the Iraqi Communist Party’s critique of ethno-sectarian imbalances 126

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in the officer corps, some of its most powerful adherents were two Sunni Arabs from the Jubur tribe, Staff Brigadier Ismail Ali and Colonel Ibrahim Husayn.71 These allegiances are significant in that they are indicative of a political public sphere that does not correlate to the Iraqi sectarian metanarrative. While patrimonial networks might explain various rival allegiances within the Free Officers, nonetheless, these officers, and their various allied political parties, were inclusive in that they recruited beyond sectarian, tribal and ethnic affiliation. While political parties had forged links with the Free Officers, it would be the career military men who decided on when and how to strike at the monarchy. In July 1958 the Free Officers mobilised in Baghdad, declaring on the radio that the monarchy had been overthrown and calling on the masses to show their support for the new republic. The involvement of the opposition political parties gave the coup the semblance of societal support, taking on the name of the 1958 Revolution. The period when the Free Officers assumed power demonstrates the blurred lines between Iraqi nationalism and pan-Arabism. The dichotomy is based on the assumption that these two currents were discrete, and assumes that pan-Arabism was a static, uniform ideology, whether adopted in Egypt, Syria, Yemen or Iraq. Despite their promises of pan-Arabism, officer elites in all of these states sought to leverage pan-Arabism to bolster their own domestic power, and thus forms of rival Iraqi pan-Arabism would clash with Egyptian pan-Arabism, particularly under the rule of Gamal Abd alNasser. While Qasim, as Iraq’s new leader, was anti-imperial and established a republic, he would not join fellow his fellow Free Officer, Nasser, in his anti-imperial project of the United Arab Republic, the union of Egypt and Syria. While Qasim was overthrown by a rival Free Officer, Abd al-Salam Arif, who was an Arab nationalist and supporter of Nasser, would also keep Iraq independent of Nasser’s Arab unification schemes.

Conclusion The Iraqi political elite under the monarchy had experienced the tribulations and transformations in the region, from expulsion from Syria to the challenge of forging an Iraqi state. They sought to author a cohesive national narrative, with the military central to that narrative. However, 127

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this elite had contested views of the role of the military in this narrative, whether it should prioritise establishing and consolidating the borders of the nation or revise the borders of the Arab world, unifying Greater Syria and Iraq. Iraqi society and politics during the monarchy formed a complex ideological landscape, and within this milieu politicised officers formed factions to assert notions of a historically legitimate Iraqi identity, in the name of either Iraq for the Iraqis or Iraq for the Arabs. These elites dictated both visions, or a hybrid of both, via conscription and education. A chasm within the military emerged based on their ties to society, regardless of their sectarian affiliation, between aging conservative exOttoman figures like Nuri al-Said, maintaining the status quo around the monarchy, and a generation of junior officers, like al-Sabbagh and the rank-and-file within the Iraqi military, who reflected socio-economic cleavages that emerged during the early formation of the Iraqi state. What had a veneer of a clash between Iraqi nationalists and pan-Arabists most likely often hid what were essentially rival nodes of power based on personal ambition. Yet its officers were also the product of society and the complex matrix of socio-cultural relations. They engaged with the intellectual clubs and political parties that represented this matrix. An inclusive and divisive public sphere emerged in Iraq during the monarchy, not as a result of a programme managed from above by the government, such as conscription, but in the space to resist or challenge a government seen as overly dependent on the British. The nascent Iraqi military emerged as a colonial enforcer, only to turn against the wishes of its colonial midwife in 1941, leading to a another British invasion and another reaction against British control in Iraqi affairs, the military coup and revolution of 1958, inaugurating Iraq’s republican era. During this period, the British envisioned the Iraqi military as an institution that could secure a state, its monarch and its borders. The military went on to control the state from 1936 to 1941 and then transform it in 1958. While society shaped the armed forces, the Iraqi military dictated the shape of the state from 1958. During the monarchy the military inaugurated a traditional pattern of oppression and cruelty as an internal discipliner, massacring Christian Assyrians in 1933, tribes in the south in 1935 and Kurdish rebels throughout the entire period of the monarchy, and rival officers with differing national aspirations. Ironically, the army, 128

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originally envisioned as a national institution, and not the tribes or Kurds, a symbol of societal discord, ultimately brought about the monarchy’s collapse in 1958, due to the military’s ability, albeit temporarily, to secure a monopoly of using violence in the state through its command of heavy artillery and airpower.

Notes 1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of CivilMilitary Relations (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (Chicago, IL:  Chicago University Press, 1965); Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations (Chicago, IL:  Chicago University Press, 1977); Amos Perlmutter, The Military and Politics in Modern Times: On Professionals, Praetorians, and Revolutionary Soldiers (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1977). 2. Risa A. Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes (London:  Routledge, 1998); Risa A. Brooks and Elizabeth A. Stanley (eds), Creating Military Power:  The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 3. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1979); Mohammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1982); Reeva S. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology (New  York:  Colombia University Press, 1986); Khaled Salih, StateMaking, Nation-Building, and the Military: Iraq, 1941–1958 (Göteborg: Göteborg University, 1996). 4. Ibrahim al-Marashi and Salama Sammy, Iraq’s Armed Forces:  An Analytical History (London; New York: Routledge, 2008). 5. Dina R. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime:  Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6. Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 7. Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932–1941 (London: Routledge, 2006). 8. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 319. 9. The National Archives, FO 371/8998, p. 35.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics, p. 76. FO 371/8998, p. 36. CO 730/7, Intelligence Report no. 27, 15 December 1921. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq:  The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 138. Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani, Tarikh al-Wizarat al-‘Iraqiyya, vol. 3 (Sayda, Lebanon: Matba’at al-’Irfan, 1940), p. 22. Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics, p. 90. Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq:  Contriving King and Country, 1914–1932 (New York: Colombia University Press, 2007), p. 98. Air 23/384, 1/BD/57, 18 October 1928. Sluglett, Britain in Iraq. Ibid. Bashkin, The Other Iraq. Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies (London: Frank Cass, 1970), pp. 274–5. William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist:  Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ Al-Husri (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 167. Paul J. Hemphill, ‘The formation of the Iraqi Army, 1921–33’, in Abbas Kelidar (ed.), The Integration of Modern Iraq (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 102. Sami Shawkat, Hadhidhi Ahdafuna:  Man Aman Biha Fahwa Minna (Baghdad: Wizarat al-Ma’arif, 1939), p. 2. Muhsin al-Musawi, Reading Iraq:  Culture and Power in Conflict (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), p. 21. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, p. 104. Ibid., pp. 54, 80. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, pp. 87–8. Filippo T.  Marinetti, ‘The Futurist manifesto’. Available at http://bactra.org/ T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html (accessed 6 June 2016). Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, pp. 58, 64, 85. Mahmud Durra, Al-Harb Al-‘Iraqiyya al-Britaniyya (Beirut:  Dar al-Tali’a, 1969), p. 14. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 132. Andrew Parasiliti, ‘Lessons learned:  the Iraqi military in politics’, in Joseph Kechichian (ed.), Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Gulf States (New  York:  Palgrave, 2001), p. 84. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 298. Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh, Fursan al-’Uruba: Mudhakkirat al-Shahid Salah alDin al-Sabbagh [1956] (Rabat: Tanit li Nashr, 1994), p. 43. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 131.

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MILITARY–SOCIETY RELATIONS IN IRAQ, 1921–58 37. FO 371/9004, 4 January 1923. 38. Sami Zubaida, ‘Contested nations:  Iraq and the Assyrians’, Nations and Nationalism 6/3 (2000), pp. 363–82, 371. 39. Ibid., p. 371. 40. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 168. 41. Khaldun S. Husry, ‘The Assyrian affair (II)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5/2 (1974), pp. 344–60, 352. 42. Hemphill, ‘The formation of the Iraqi Army, 1921–33,’ p. 108. 43. Faysal al-Samir, ‘The role of the army in the national in the social and political development of Iraq’, in Claude Heller (ed.), The Military as an Agent of Social Change (Mexico, DF: El Colegio de Mexico, 1981), pp. 111–12. 44. Bashkin, The Other Iraq. 45. Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity, State Formation and Conscription in Postcolonial Iraq: the Case of the Yazidi Kurds of Jabal Sinjar’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (4) (1997), pp. 559–80. 46. FO 371/20795, 23 December 1936 47. Hemphill, ‘The formation of the Iraqi Army, 1921–33’, p. 99. 48. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, p. 134. 49. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, p. 54. 50. Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics, p. 94. 51. Eric Davis, Memories of State:  Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 147. 52. Keiko Sakai, ‘Tribalization as a tool of state control in Iraq: observations on the army, the cabinets and the National Assembly’, in Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawood (eds), Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2003), pp. 136–64, 139–40. 53. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 55. 54. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, p. 31. 55. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, pp. 71, 131. 56. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, p. 26. 57. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 53. 58. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, p. 84. 59. Eliezer Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society (London:  Pall Mall, 1970), p. 18. 60. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, p. 71. 61. Al-Sabbagh, Fursan al-’Uruba, p. 43. 62. Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism. 63. Ibid., p. 108. 64. FO 371/40044/E700/42/93, 6 January 1944. 65. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, pp. 161–2.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 66. Benjamin Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics, Discourse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 93. 67. Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900–1963:  Capital, Power, and Ideology (New York: State University New York Press, 1997), p. 108. 68. Al-Musawi, Reading Iraq, p. 57. 69. Ismail al-Arif, Iraq Reborn: A Firsthand Account of the July 1958 Revolution and After (New York: New Vantage Press, 1982), pp. 47–8. 70. Majid Khadduri, Republican Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 23. 71. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, pp. 792–3.

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Part II

Republican Iraq: State–Society Relations Under Authoritarian Rule

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6 ‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Student Movements of the First Iraqi Republic, 1958–63 Jordi Tejel The bulk of historical research on the colonial and post-colonial eras in the Middle East has traditionally stressed the prominent role of young people, and students in particular, in anti-colonial struggle. Ahmed Abdalla, for example, pointed out that students played an essential role both in Egypt and abroad ‘in the framework of their country’s struggle for national independence’.1 Similar patterns occurred in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia up to the 1960s, as was the case in many other colonial territories where students energised the public arena and purported to speak to and in the name of the nation. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, students in the Third World took the lead in ‘patriotism’ because they were encouraged and flattered by the local Westernised nationalist elites who considered students as the ‘vanguard’ of their upcoming independent nations.2 In turn, students served the nationalist elites because they had the ability to spread the word of the nationalist parties all over the country. The body of studies on youth movements, not to mention student movements, throughout the first decades of Iraqi modern history is, however, in dire contrast with that. Apart from a few exceptions,3 scholars have focused on the attempts to transform the Iraqi youth into ‘true patriots’ by educationalists4 such as Sati al-Husri, Fadil al-Jamali and Sami Shawkat working for the new Iraqi state. Alternatively, they have dealt with 135

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the intellectual struggle between Iraqi and pan-Arab nationalists (Watani versus Qawmi) and how both camps sought to mobilise Iraqi youngsters around their ideological programmes.5 Yet both focuses of attention, although drawing from accurate observations, are problematic, for two main reasons. Firstly, protests are framed as ‘corporatist’, ‘political’, ‘sectarian’ or ‘social’, depending on who is speaking and who the audience is, consequently taking into account only one of the time sequences of a given student mobilisation. However, since protests evolve over time, both actors and demands – or frames – may vary in the course of events due to a wide range of factors (such as the interaction with the state or counter-movements).6 In that sense, a detailed historical account of protests and social movements may reveal the richness and complexity of revolutionary situations. Moreover, it may offer puzzling insights as the frame-shifting process may occur in a very rapid manner. For instance, a report from the French Embassy on the 1952 Intifada in Baghdad noted that ‘strictly student-based on Saturday morning, the riots which had rapidly shifted into communist demonstrations revealed themselves as sectarian quarrels [by Monday]’.7 Secondly, studies on educational reforms during the colonial and postcolonial periods, as well as on Arab nationalism, tend to overlook the young people’s, and students in particular, capacity of agency. They are based on a top-down approach that assumes that states and adult political parties were the sole ‘constructors’ of the emerging new social category, the educated youth.8 Drawing on McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly’s relational perspective, as well as on the works highlighting the importance of the dialectic relationship between state and society, our argument is that we should also analyse state and student relations during the Qasim period (1958–63) the other way around. ‘Abd al-Karem Qasim and Iraqi political parties were extremely sensitive to and affected by the tensions and changes occurring in colleges.9 While the regime and dissident groups intended to co-opt students through redistribution of resources, the student body was emboldened by them, both materially and politically.10 Consequently the dialectic relationship between students and the state provided an open political arena in which the former were able to create political opportunities for themselves. Secondly, it led to the appropriation of important locations for gatherings 136

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and protests (e.g. the University of Baghdad, but also the ‘street’ in its broad sense). Finally, it participated in the shaping of the youth as a distinct social group despite the state’s pretension to be the sole ‘constructor’.11 The first part of this chapter demonstrates that although the interwar era had already witnessed the emergence of youth movements in the Middle East as the first visible manifestation of ‘youth’ as a social category in its own right, at that time students of higher education were only a small group. As the number of secondary schools and colleges increased in Iraq, students’ participation in popular uprisings in 1948, 1952 and again during the Suez crisis in 1956 grew exponentially. However, public discourse regarding the youth in the early 1950s was ambivalent. The Iraqi educated youth, as elsewhere in the region, was indeed viewed as the ‘jewel’ of the nation, yet, at the same time, students were also perceived as a peril. In the second section, it will be argued that the first years of the Republic were a turning point. Between 1958 and 1960, Qasim established an intense and direct relationship with the student body and the intellectuals committed to the Republic and Iraqi nationalism, as opposed to pan-Arab nationalism. As Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir did in Egypt, not only did Qasim increase the number of students and colleges, but he also propelled the students to the status of a vehicle for social change. Students were ‘soldiers’ committed to the defence of the Revolution and its principles. Furthermore, Qasim was the first Iraqi leader to encourage student activism through international networks that praised the student movement from a militant viewpoint. The last section will show that, like his peers, once Qasim discovered that students were not the ‘object’ of state policies he had hoped for, he sought to restrain their recently gained autonomy and in fine depoliticise them. In so doing, by 1962 Qasim had alienated all his allies and, not surprisingly, radicalised the Ba‘thist camp. As elsewhere in the Middle East, the expansion of the educational base to wider sections of society had a significant destabilising effect. Between 1958 and 1963, in countries such as Iraq, the ambition to become developed, together with the obvious capacity of students to mobilise the public, led Qasim to accept a ‘student bargain’ as his regime became increasingly dependent on higher education for political and social legitimacy. Nevertheless, this bargain had its limits. Far from being isolated from the rest of society, the university became a sort of ‘barometer of crises, of tensions and ruptures occurring in all 137

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social sectors’12 and students their ‘alert elite’.13 Perhaps not coincidentally, a student strike initiated at the College of Medicine in December 1962, announced the end of Qasim’s regime 43 days later.

Education, Modernisation and Nationalism As the Ottoman Empire became threatened by Western expansion in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century, Ottoman sultans implemented policies to reverse the fragmentation process, to centralise and expand their authority in the Empire. This process, also known as ‘defensive developmentalism’, consisted of two major steps. First, the elites sought to reform the army in order to avoid future military defeats. Second, they aimed to build and maintain a modern army to defend their territories. Ottoman rulers needed, inter alia, to expand the sources of income under their control by collecting taxes. They also needed to increase their ability to discipline the population and train new administrators through a modern education system. In this sense, higher education was meant to play a significant role in saving the Empire. The College of Law in Baghdad, founded by the Ottomans in 1908, was the sole secular institution of higher education in Mesopotamia in the early twentieth century. Other colleges were established in the interwar era; the College of Education in 1927 and the College of Pharmacy in 1936, but the first state university was founded only in 1956. Notwithstanding poor educational achievements in Iraq, with only one-third of the urban population being literate as late as 1957,14 all accounts of the anti-colonial struggle in Iraq highlight the role of students as the initiators of the most significant popular uprisings (the Wathba in 1949 and the Intifada in 1952) and mass demonstrations. Yet, as Matthieu Rey notes, surprisingly, once these protests shifted into mass movements, students ‘disappeared’ from the scene and gave way to the pre-eminence of adult organisations. In so doing, the initiators became mere followers.15 This student ‘disappearance’ during the course of events in favour of adult organisations might be explained by three complementary factors. Firstly, the timid expansion of secondary and higher education stimulated the growth of nationalism and associative life through formal networks such as student organisations, professional associations and clubs.16 138

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Educationalists, such as Sati al-Husri, Director General of the Ministry of Education between 1921–7, intended to provide the Iraqis with a modern education system in which students were encouraged to believe that ‘they were part of an Arab nation’. Moreover, in the 1930s nationalist voices became influential in the Ministry of Education, whilst articles in student journals ‘hailed commitment to the nation and the willingness of youth to self-sacrifice’.17 Of course, the regional political context (Palestine, in particular, and the patronising British policy in Iraq, combined with strict restrictions on basic freedoms) galvanised Arab nationalism as the main cultural idiom in the interwar era among students and the young effendiyya.18 More importantly, the student body acquired a visibility in the urban sphere in the 1930s as the disciplined student marches, which were joined by other youth movements, mainly scouts, became part of the Baghdadi urban scenery. Iraqi students, as elsewhere in developing countries, considered themselves to be the collective conscience of society. This feeling was reinforced when the adults failed to fight off British influence in the country, even after the mandate officially ended. Significantly, at that time, students constituted one of the rare sectors of Iraqi society that had easy access to political books and leaflets as well as to the press. As such, student political activities introduced students as a status group with relative prestige into the social and political system rather than alienating them.19 In that sense, although students were the initiators of the country’s most important mass demonstrations, they let the adult political parties take the lead ‘for the sake of the nation’. In other words, one must keep in mind that Iraqi popular uprisings in the 1940s and 1950s were the reflection of a multi-sectorial mobilisation:20 members of very different sectors of society, among which were students, took to the streets to protest against British imperialism. Students often went to protests as individuals, not as a homogenous group. Yet merging into the general protest and addressing students’ demands could help to make the uprisings successful. A second factor that might help us understand the uneven role of students in political mobilisation in Iraq was the students’ lack of organisation. Against this backdrop, the representatives of student committees of 21 schools and colleges in Baghdad met in 1947 to create the General Union of Iraqi Students (GUIS). Concomitantly, the establishment of the GUIS was 139

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linked to two social and political developments: namely, the government’s incapacity to stop the rising cost of living affecting most Iraqis and the announcement of diplomatic negotiations between Iraq and Great Britain in January 1948, around the final withdrawal of all British forces, including the Royal Air Force. Students immediately organised a strike at the Faculty of Law on 5 January. The official announcement of the Portsmouth Treaty ten days later spurred the creation of the Higher Institutes Students’ Committee, grouping different trends and beliefs. From that moment on, students (men and women) geared their efforts towards the organisation of strikes along with ‘patriotic’ political parties and social organisations.21 Finally, and related to the previous point, we should also take into account state violence. Students paid a high price for their participation in the Wathba (‘The Leap’) in 1948.22 The GUIS was indeed one of the targets of police repression and other disciplinary measures. Its leaders were arrested and sent to prisons and concentration camps, whilst the Iraqi government liquidated all of its organisations throughout the country. The first signs of student revival appeared in February 1951. The union charter was distributed and the first issue of the union’s magazine Saut al-Talaba (The Students’ Voice) came out, containing the most important student news. The GUIS undertook a wide range of overt actions, such as social activities, lectures, drama performances, open-air picnics, editing of papers like the magazine of the medical faculty and wall newspapers edited by secondary school students.23 The revival of student activism paved the way for a new episode of mass demonstrations and urban riots in November 1952, more commonly known as the Intifada. Initially calling for an improvement in university conditions, the students, a small number of whom were communists and leftist, soon widened the scope, merging social and national issues.24 On 23 November opposition leaders and workers joined the protests.25 As in 1948, the aftermath of the 1952 Intifada had an enormous impact on the student movement as well as on all dissident organisations. Political parties and unions were banned and all newspapers were closed down. If the Iraqi government allowed the first free legislative elections in June 1954, Nuri al-Said decided in September of the same year to again ban all political parties and associations, in particular the Peace Partisan and Democratic Youth, an organisation close to the Communist Party. 140

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Unsurprisingly, leftist students again took the lead in the underground activities both in Iraq and abroad.26 Overall, the relationship between the Iraqi state and the student movement was one of mistrust. The government was fully aware of the students’ capacity to mobilise for national independence against the British and the incumbent cabinet. Thus, although Nuri al-Said’s interest in education grew over the years, the part played by students between 1948 and 1956 against government policies profoundly ‘disturbed him’.27 Tensions between the government and the student movement were not solely limited to political issues. Iraq’s dire economic situation, worsened by the historical floods of 1954, was also a concern for many educated Iraqis, who were under- or unemployed.28 Women’s concerns about gender equality and social justice also prompted increasing numbers of female students to join the popular uprisings between 1948 and 1952. In the face of this new challenge, Iraqi educators working for the Ministry of Education suggested even more differentiation in the curriculum ‘on the basis of sex, and more attention to “real-life” rather than “academic” learning for female students’.29 In sum, by the late 1950s, although national educators and political elites hailed students as the ‘vanguard’ of the nation, the rise of student dissent, the increasing challenge to gender roles and the creation of corporative organisations that escaped government control strained the relationship between the state and the student movement. The students had indeed responded to the Iraqi elites’ invitation to take a more active role in imagining the nation. Yet the response was not as expected.

Embracing the ‘Soldiers’ of Justice On 14 July 1958 the tanks of the Iraqi army rolled into Baghdad and surrounded the royal family at Rihab Palace. In spite of the King’s desire to surrender, the royal family was assassinated on the spot, except for the crown prince’s sister. The following day, Nuri al-Said was captured and killed while trying to escape. The Free Officers’ Movement, led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and Colonel ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif among others, had been successful.30 Whether it was qualified as a mere coup d’état by some (due to the lack of active role of the masses on that very day) or a revolution 141

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on its own by the others,31 the regime that emerged from the ashes of the monarchy paved the way for a radical change in the relationship between the state and the student movement, in particular between 1958 and 1960. It has been rightly argued that at first the new regime bore the imprint of ambiguity, as Qasim and other members of the Free Officers had no distinguishable political orientation. Yet as Qasim asserted himself as the ‘sole leader’, purging potential adversaries, he was compelled to choose his allies. Thus the new regime was backed by different sectors from the Iraqi opposition, among which were the NDP (National Democratic Party) and the KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party). However, the ICP (Iraqi Communist Party) stood apart. According to Batatu, the ICP constituted the only organised force capable of offsetting the nationalist officers (mainly pan-Arabists) who sought to provoke Qasim’s downfall. This is, in essence, why the latter began giving in to the demands of the ICP.32 Qasim thus allowed the ICP to become increasingly dominant in different social domains, such as the worker and student unions. In March 1959, the posts of Chief Censor and Director General of Guidance were also allocated to well-known communists, while Naziha al-Dulaimi became the first woman and communist to be appointed to the Iraqi government. Beyond their strategic alliance, Qasim and the communists shared some ideas and goals: a vague concept of social justice and the pursuit of social and economic development. On the cultural level, Qasim shared two other goals with the ‘progressive forces’, namely ‘liberation’ of Iraqi culture from the colonial legacy and a ‘desire for modernity’ in which intellectuals, technical schools and higher education institutions were supposed to play a relevant role. As elsewhere in the world, a belief in human capital theory encouraged Iraqi elites to see a direct relationship between investment in human resources and economic development.33 More significantly, within the context of the July Revolution the regime, as in Egypt under Nasir, encouraged students to be instrumental in the making of the ‘Young Republic’. If in the past students had had to serve the nation through their commitment to Arab nationalism, Iraqi students received additional missions in the post-1958 period: ‘students are always [emphasis added] soldiers of justice, democracy, liberty and peace’.34 In that sense, Qasim promised to ‘work to increase cooperation among students and to mobilise their strength for our just causes [emphasis added].’35 142

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Expectations vis-à-vis students were not solely limited to the state. To the Iraqi Communist Party, for example, ‘[t]he students are part of the enlightened section of the people … they could play a big part in deepening patriotic political consciousness and in combating reactionaries and imperialism’.36 Not surprisingly, also as in Egypt,37 ‘progressive’ students and intellectuals generally welcomed the end of the monarchy and responded favourably to such statements with a similar discourse. In retrospect, it may seem that the close connection between Qasim’s regime and the student movement was the natural outcome of a shared history of struggle against imperialism. In fact, however, Qasim’s approach to the student movement evolved positively towards leftist students only over a period of time. During the second week of November 1958 the Cabinet authorised the General Students’ Federation to be the sole representative of secondary school and university students in Iraq. The aims of the federation, as envisaged by the Minister of Education, were nevertheless to discourage the traditional commitment of Iraqi students to politics. These objectives were described in an approving newspaper comment as ‘enabling the students to organize their social and cultural activities on a nonpartisan basis’.38 Yet other needs and interests soon prevailed. In view of student activities among pan-Arab groups, the ministry did its best (through, for instance, media support from the government, exclusion of non-Iraqi students from the electoral body) to pave the way for leftist elements during student elections that took place in 1959. Subsequently, the communist student candidates won the university elections and Mahdi ‘Abd al-Karim, from the Medical College, was elected president. Despite these tricks, the results of unions’ elections (trade unions and student associations) in 1959 are relevant since they were the only elections held in Iraq under Qasim and thus constitute a barometer of popular support for the government in the early republican period. Thereafter, the GUIS pursued some political goals along the same lines as those advanced by ‘organic intellectuals’: to cultivate love for the homeland, liberty and democracy, and to strengthen the great fraternity among Arabs, Kurds and other minorities.39 By early 1959, a convergence of interests between Qasim, the ICP and the GUIS had clearly crystallised. Indeed, Qasim attempted to win the students’ hearts. Whilst in the 1957–8 academic year, 13 colleges comprised 143

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the higher education network with 5,000 students, the following year, Qasim’s cabinet opened three new higher institutes and reintroduced evening courses, thus increasing the numbers of students to 8,700.40 Likewise, addressing the First Conference of the Teachers’ Union in Iraq, Qasim promised the creation of a new campus for the University of Baghdad: ‘We shall disregard the cost for the sake of science … The University will cater for 12,000 students.’41 Yet the end of the monarchy, together with Qasim’s ‘revolutionary discourse’, as well as the regional competition between Qasim and the Egyptian president, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, opened the door to the emergence of atavistic relations between the opposing groups. As Qasim let the communists have a free hand in secondary schools and colleges, the latter organised numerous demonstrations and reportedly practised a witchhunting policy against Ba‘thist and Nasserist elements.42 In parallel, the regime was reported to have arrested 92 teachers and four professors with pan-Arab leanings by December 1959.43 More significantly, communist groups attacked pan-Arab students at colleges with sticks and occasionally with knives with total impunity, preventing them from entering the campus.44 Pressure on pan-Arab sectors was also exerted abroad. As communists increasingly dominated the Iraqi Students’ Society in the UK, pan-Arab students withdrew from the association to establish the Arab Students’ Union in the UK, embracing all ‘Arab students from all parts of the Arab world’ in that country. Yet, Ibrahim Kubbah, the Minister of Economy, launched a campaign of intimidation of the new society members, threatening them with ending their scholarships if they did not withdraw from the union,45 a threat which was disregarded by the leftist students who, in turn, labelled the new pan-Arab organisation as a ‘fascist gang’.46 Paradoxically, while communist and Ba‘thist militants shared some common political goals and to some extent a common ‘Thirdworldist’ discourse throughout the 1950s, the post-1958 era triggered a merciless struggle for ideological hegemony between both camps, with unforeseen consequences for the country, as Iraqi contemporary history was to reveal. Within the context of his ‘special relationship’ with the GUIS, Qasim also encouraged the internationalisation of the Iraqi youth as a signal of his commitment to the revolution. Thus, for example, Iraq celebrated 144

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for the first time in its history the Students and Youth Solidarity Day in February 1959. In July of the same year, dozens of Iraqis attended the 7th World Festival of Students and Youth, organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth  – a leftist platform  – held in Vienna. In October 1960, Baghdad hosted the VIth International Union of Students (IUS) Congress – another organisation with a clear ‘Thirdworldist’ leaning – with the participation of delegates and observers from 73 countries. The congress was a new opportunity for the IUS to condemn imperialism and ‘show international solidarity’ with students and people of Algeria, Cuba and the Congo. As a result of Qasim’s commitment to ‘Kurdish-Arab brotherhood’, the IUS declared its support for the ‘just demand of the Kurdish people in Iranian and Turkish Kurdistan to enjoy their national and cultural rights’.47 Finally, Qasim attended its opening session and once again hailed the role of students in the advancement of national and social progress, particularly in developing countries.

Moving Backwards Though scholars have underlined how political parties and the state exploited student organisations in order to serve their own interests, the other side of the coin has been largely neglected. Students’ demands rapidly became politicised because students’ associations and students as individuals were linked to a series of networks, some formal (political parties, clubs, etc.), others informal (religious brotherhoods, ethnic groups and villages). While students served as a vehicle for tensions and interests of those networks, they were also able to utilise those channels of dissent in order to advance their collective and individual interests. In fact it is difficult to separate political demands from student claims. Taking advantage of the special relationship between the state and universities, students and faculty members voiced diverse claims. Some were related to their status, others had a clear political tendency that in fact offered some legitimacy to their demands. In that sense, the president of GUIS noted that: While we fought on one front against the enemies of the people and their masters, we also fought for the specific demands of the students and for the improvement of their living conditions.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ We never lost sight of this in our work, because it was the means by which all students could be mobilized and their activities coordinated [emphasis added].48

Furthermore, because meeting student requests had a lower political cost than addressing broad political demands, governments tended to ‘satisfy’ students. In so doing, successive Iraqi governments acknowledged a sort of ‘student bargain’, where state concessions gradually empowered the student body and the faculty. The following three instances, taken from three different periods, lend credence to this view. In the aftermath of the student mobilisations of 1952, the Iraqi government saw itself obliged to make certain concessions by announcing, among other measures, that higher education would be free.49 Following the 1958 revolution, the Iraqi government opened three new higher education institutions and reintroduced evening courses. Apparently as a result of ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif ’s ascension to power in November 1963, his cabinet boosted the budget for the University of Baghdad, created a Superior Council of Scientific Research, established new faculties in Baghdad and Mosul and promised the creation of a university in Basra.50 In that sense, as Joel S. Migdal, Tamir Moustafa and other scholars note, the state should be considered not as separate from society, but rather as an institution embedded in society. While the state can often adopt policies that will enhance its ‘autonomy’ from societal influences, this strategy can hardly achieve complete success. Bureaucrats and even top decision makers are, after all, members of the society they govern.51 In addition, more often than not the state’s control over society is limited. It was precisely the acknowledgement of both the limits of the state and the students’ growing role in Iraqi political and social life that led Qasim, as Nasir had done before, to seek an effective ‘normalisation’ of the university through the isolation of the student movement from party politics, or ‘depoliticisation’.52 The move against the student movement, dominated as it was by leftwing students, must also be placed within the general context of increasingly strained relations between Qasim and his two main allies, the ICP and the KDP. Following al-Shawwaf ’s abortive revolt, led by pan-Arab officers in Mosul in March 1959, Qasim relied heavily on the communists and Kurdish militias in order to secure the survival of the regime. In parallel, purges within the army became widespread. At the same time, however, 146

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Qasim became wary of communist ascent, including within secondary schools and colleges. The riots that broke out in Kirkuk on Revolution Day in 1959, reportedly provoked by communist and Kurdish forces, provided Qasim with an opportunity to put an end to challenges from his ‘allies’. The Popular Resistance Force, mainly animated by leftist members of the Iraqi Youth Federation, was put on ice. On 1 January 1960 Qasim passed the Law of Association, which formally permitted political life in Iraq to resume but stated that students in higher institutions were forbidden to participate in any kind of party activity on their college grounds. Despite this anticommunist campaign, the ICP continued to give its unconditional support to the government because of ‘the necessity to solidify national unity and support the ruling leaders in their efforts to protect this republic’,53 in the words of Amer Abdalla, a party leader. In retrospect, it clearly appears that relations between Qasim and the ICP had never been easy. Political and symbolic victories for one side or the other were the consequence of several factors such as power balance, domestic as well as regional contexts and tensions on each side. Thus, for example, according to some reports, although Qasim permitted the GUIS to sponsor the IUS congress in Baghdad in 1960, the government did its best to avoid a spill over of ‘communist’ ideas. Consequently, the government seized most of the IUS publications at the airport and let the nationalist newspapers attack the IUS. Moreover, nationalist students were allowed to demonstrate at the airport as the IUS delegates to the congress arrived.54 Emboldened by these ‘liberties’, the National Union of Iraqi Students (NUIS), with an obvious pan-Arab leaning, was established at the College of Medicine in Baghdad in December 1961. Ironically, Qasim’s complicity with the consolidation of a counter-movement at colleges in order to curtail communist influence did not prevent the NUIS from playing an essential role in his overthrow two years later. Indeed, the 43-day long student strike initiated on 16 and 17 December 1962, first in secondary schools and then at the university, presaged the collapse of Qasim’s regime on 8 February 1963.55 Students asked for academic freedom, better conditions for themselves, new student elections and the release of all interned and arrested students.56 The protest movement was nevertheless unevenly followed. Thus, the Colleges of Arts, Science and the American Institute of Languages seconded the strike en masse, whereas 147

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the College of Commerce and the Al-Hikma College (run by American Jesuits) did not join the student movement.57 At first Qasim and his entourage were reluctant to suppress the student movement because they were in a dilemma: ‘They [had] talked loud and long about the achievements of the Republic and the importance attached to education and [were] now faced with a general strike by the students.’ Consequently, ‘they [could] not make them return to their studies by physical force’ for ‘the more force they [used], the more the students would [rise] against them and the more harm would [be] done to the image of the government in the eyes of the young intelligentsia’.58 By early January, however, the government proceeded to arrest several university lecturers, professors and students (as many as 900), men and women alike.59 Interestingly enough, observation of the student milieu allows us to introduce some nuances into the understanding of the very last days of Qasim’s regime. It is generally believed that although communists were indeed dissatisfied with Qasim, they could not actively side with the opposition for ‘the most likely successors to Qasim … [were] right-wing Arab nationalists who would suppress the communists even more than the present regime [did]’.60 If this view was a sensible one, the leftist student camp proved to be less reliable than the ICP direction. One must keep in mind that the ICP had already voiced its concerns about the student situation during a conference in early 1962. The party noted that ‘the antidemocratic policy of the government during the last two years had resulted in a weakening of the Student Union and in closing or restricting the activities of most of its branches in the Liwas (provinces) and in Baghdad’. Against this backdrop, the ICP proposed to launch a campaign under the slogans of ‘free elections, defense of the social, economic and academic interests of the students and of their rights’.61 Ironically, Qasim’s policy was even exposed to international criticism by the IUS, which in 1961 voiced the Iraqi delegation’s concerns about the continuous and ‘unjustified’ delay of student elections.62 Subsequently, between 1961 and 1962 the GUIS led large demonstrations to protest against government educational policies.63 Nevertheless, the origins of the student strike of 1963 remain obscure. A  communist daily, Saut al-Ahrar, stressed that the GUIS wished to add ‘their voice to that of the other students in the realisation of their 148

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lawful demands’.64 By the same token, the Baghdadi newspaper Al-Muwatin reported that when the strike began on 16 December 1962 at the Eastern Secondary School for Boys (Sharqiyah), there were slogans asking for new student elections from both the GUIS and the NUIS. Yet despite the apparent unity of the student movement behind those slogans, a fight started outside the school premises between the students at Sharqiyah. Moreover, the following day GUIS partisans were again attacked by pan-Arab students, resulting in a number of them being wounded, cut telephone wires and destruction of the school’s furniture.65 After four years of alliance with the regime, and although some leftist students backed the strike, Ba‘thist as well as NDP students perceived the former as a part of the problem, rather than the solution to it. By 1962, Qasim was isolated both externally and internally. On the one hand, Iraq had withdrawn from the CENTO (Central Treaty Organization) umbrella; Egypt and other Arab countries were disappointed by Qasim’s Arab nationalist policy and were plotting against him. The Kennedy administration, which had remained neutral in 1961, embraced regime change as the US policy objective in Iraq one year later for several reasons, one of which was Qasim’s ambition for Kuwait’s oil.66 On the other hand, Qasim’s anti-communist turn since 1960 triggered, as we have seen, an increasing gap between his cabinet and the communists. By the same token, Qasim’s authoritarian drift had not only alienated the most active supporters of his regime but also sectors of the ‘intelligentsia’ that had at first welcomed the end of the monarchy, among which were non-communist students and professors. Thus, the latter saw in the student strike an opportunity to advance their own corporatist claims related to issues such as academic freedom and salaries. All in all, the student strike cannot be considered as a solely Ba‘thist protest movement. As we have shown, it attracted different sectors drawn from diverse political orientations, fostering the sentiment that Qasim was indeed alone. When the Ba‘thist officers led the coup d’état on 8 February 1963, Qasim refused to arm the few communist militants that came to his defence. Whatever the reasons, Qasim and hundreds of communist partisans underwent the same fate: Ba‘thist militias (composed mainly of university students) executed Qasim, along with his top lieutenants, as well as some 1,500 suspected communists, within the following two days.67 149

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Conclusion Since the first half of the twentieth century both Arab educationalists and political groups sought to mould the sensibilities and aspirations of the rising generations for the ‘sake of the nation’. Feared and hailed at the same time by the Iraqi elites during the monarchist period, Abd al-Karim Qasim was the first Iraqi leader to permit the students to actually play an active role in Iraq’s social and political life. This chapter suggests that Abd al-Karim Qasim’s developmentalist ambitions, together with the exploitation of students’ capacity to mobilise, led the Iraqi regime to establish an ambiguous relationship with the young leftist ‘intelligentsia’, made up of intellectuals and students. On the one hand, the Iraqi regime became increasingly dependent on these sectors for political and social legitimacy. Furthermore, intellectuals and institutions of higher education won major concessions from the government by forming loose alliances with state officials sympathetic to student and university interests, while some communist members held state positions. On the other hand, generally speaking, the ICP and its sister organisations supported the regime until its collapse, despite important grievances. In order to grasp the alliance between the regime and leftist groups better, we have suggested that if scholars must be aware of the strategies and intentions of the actors involved in the political field, they must also take into account the interactions between those strategies, intentions and visions over time. In that sense, the bases of cooperation between Qasim and the Iraqi left in 1958 were to be renegotiated throughout Qasim’s period, leading to a series of conflicts and compromises half-heartedly accepted by both sides. Moreover, one cannot analyse this relationship solely in terms of needs and strategies. Qasim and the ICP shared some views about Iraq’s identity, as well as some social and political goals. In other words, Qasim’s regime benefited from a certain degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi left and other sectors of society. Finally, Qasim’s intention to limit communist influence between 1960–3 had an unintentional consequence: he drastically weakened his political base. By the same token, the ICP realised towards the end of Qasim’s regime how isolated it was in spite of having controlled some key positions within the state apparatus. Its close cooperation with the regime had not brought 150

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about an increasing hegemony of Iraqi society, but rather it had created a gap between the former and the latter. In that sense, the study of the student strike of December 1962– January 1963 offers an interesting timeframe in which to observe how both actors – the regime and the leftist student movement – were trapped by their alliance. While between 1958 and 1960 Qasim effectively emboldened the leftist student body in order to curtail the pan-Arab groups among the Iraqi youth, from 1960 onwards he unsuccessfully sought to demobilise the student milieu. Propelled to the forefront of the political scene, students and professors rejected the idea of taking a step back and saw an opportunity in the student protests to express, from various positions, their rejection of Qasim’s dictatorship. The students and professors did not, of course, provoke the collapse of the regime. As many studies have demonstrated, the Ba‘thist coup d’état of February 1963 was just one attempt of many. Yet, through the observation of state–student relations, we have been able to trace the process of Qasim’s rise and fall, thereby confirming the view that in the aftermath of World War II, universities in the Middle East became a ‘barometer of crises, of tensions and ruptures occurring in all social sectors’ and students their ‘alert elite’.

Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a larger research project entitled ‘States, Minorities and Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of the Durability of States and Regimes and Dissident Movements in Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey, 1948–2003’. I am grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for providing the grant to support this research project launched in 2010.

Notes 1. Ahmad Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt, 1923–73 (London:  Saqi Books, 1985), p.  38; Haggai Erlich, Students and University in Twentieth Century Egyptian Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1989). 2. Seymour M. Lipset, ‘University students and politics in underdeveloped countries’, Comparative Education Review 10/2 (1966), pp. 132–62, 134.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 3. Michael Eppel, ‘The elite, the effendiyya, and the growth of nationalism and Pan-Arabism in Hashemite Iraq 1921–58’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1998), pp. 227–50; Peter Wien, ‘“Watan” and “Rujula”. The emergence of a new model of youth in interwar Iraq’, in J.B. Simonsen (ed.), Youth and Youth Culture in the Contemporary Middle East (Aarhus:  Aarhus University Press, 2005), pp. 10–20. 4. Reeva S. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars:  The Militarist Origins of Tyranny (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 69–72; Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq:  Contriving King and Country (London:  I.B.Tauris, 2007), p. 197. 5. Amatzia Baram, ‘Qawmiyya and wataniyya in Ba‘thi Iraq:  The search for a new balance’, Middle Eastern Studies 19/2 (1983), pp. 188–200; Eric Davis, Memories of State:  Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 2005); Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 293–312. 6. David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, ‘Movements, counter-movements, and the structure of political opportunity’, American Journal of Sociology 5/1 (1996), pp. 1628–60. 7. Centre d’Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (hereafter CADN), Embassy, London, No. 569. C.A. Clarac, French Ambassador (Baghdad) to the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Paris). Baghdad, 1st December 1952. 8. In the Ottoman Empire, increasing bureaucratisation and institutionalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped to define youth as a distinct social category alongside other segments. As a result of the Islahat Decree of 1856, the Ottoman government introduced changes to the traditional education system. This decree highlighted the emphasis on placing schools under a central ministry to establish an educational system outside the control of the religious authorities. Over time, youth became that part of the society that attended modern school, was enrolled in university or drafted into the army. While ‘youth’ and ‘student’ categories overlapped for many years, the development of student movements with specific demands from the 1950s onwards led to an increasing gap between the former and the latter. 9. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad (eds), State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 10. Fahim Qubain, Education and Science in the Arab World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), p. 502.

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‘DANGEROUS LIAISONS’ 11. Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (London: Routledge, 1994). 12. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire. Politique en Tunisie de Bourguiba à Ben Ali (Paris:  Presses de Sciences Po, 2003), p. 315. 13. Abdul-Monem al-Mashat, ‘Egyptian attitudes toward the peace process: Views of an “alert elit”’, The Middle East Journal 37/3 (1983), pp. 394–411, 61. 14. Bassam Yousif, Human Development in Iraq: 1950–1990 (London:  Routledge, 2012), p. 65. 15. Matthieu Rey, ‘Comment les forces d’opposition revendiquaient-elles le pouvoir? L’Intifada en Irak en 1952’, L’Homme et la société 187/8 (2013), pp. 183–204, 203. 16. Davis, Memories of State, p. 73; Bashkin, The Other Iraq, pp. 54–86. 17. Ibid., pp. 231–2. 18. Eppel, ‘The elite, the effendiyya, and the growth of nationalism’. 19. John W. Meyer and Richard Rubinson, ‘Structural determinants of student political activity:  A  comparative interpretation’, Sociology of Education 45/1 (1972), pp. 23–46. 20. Michel Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques, 3rd edn (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009). 21. CADN, Embassy, London, No. 569. French Ambassador in Iraq to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Baghdad, 23 January 1948. 22. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 545–66. 23. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘Yesterday and Today, Students of Iraq’, p. 47. 24. CADN, No. 569, MAE, Telegram, Baghdad; CADN, No. 569, French Embassy (Baghdad) to French Embassy (London). 25. CADN, No. 569, C.A. Clarac. 26. CADN, No. 883, Pierre de Vaucelles. 27. Waldemar J. Gallman, Iraqi Under General Nuri. My Recollections of Nuri alSaid, 1954–58 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), p. 124. 28. National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA, College Park), 787.5/4–2655. Despatch No. 522, Gallman to Department of State, Baghdad, 26 April 1955. 29. Sara Pursley, ‘Building the nation through the production of difference’, in Jordi Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco and Hamit Bozarslan (eds), Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), pp. 119–41, 138.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 30. See Uriel Dann, Iraq under Qassem: a Political History, 1958–63 (New York: Praeger, 1969); Juan Romero, The Iraqi Revolution of 1958: A Revolutionary Quest for Unity and Security (Lanham, MD:  University Press of America, 2011). 31. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Dann, Iraq under Qassem; Batatu, The Old Social Classes; Davis, Memories of State; Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001). Romero, The Iraqi Revolution of 1958. 32. Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p. 847. 33. Ronald G. Sultana, ‘The Euro-Mediterranean regions and its universities: An overview of trends, challenges, and prospects’, Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies 4/2 (1999), pp. 7–49, 17. 34. Statement by Colonel Fadhil Abbas Al Mahdawi, 16 February 1959; Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘The Iraqi student’, Published by GUIS 1/1, June 1959, p. 3. 35. The National Archives (TNA), FO 371/141086, British Embassy (Baghdad) to Eastern Department, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 26 February 1959. 36. Iraqi Communist Party, Iraqi Letter, 2–3 (February–March 1962), p. 25. 37. Abdalla, The Student Movement; Erlich, Students and University. 38. Dann, Iraq under Qassem, p. 121. 39. See Davis, Memories of State. 40. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘Yesterday and Today, Students of Iraq’, p. 15. 41. Kurdish Students’ Society in Europe (KSSE), Kurdistan, No. IV, April 1959. 42. TNA, FO 371/141086, British Embassy (Baghdad) to Foreign Office (London), 11 May 1959. 43. New York Times, 1959. 44. Interview with Rifaat Abd ‘al-Shawani, former student at Baghdad University. Paris, 3 February 2012. 45. TNA, FO 371/141087, Home Office (London) to Foreign Office (London). London, 2 October 1959. 46. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘The Iraqi student’, published by General Union of Iraqi Students (GUIS), No. 1, Vol. 1, June 1959, p. 8. 47. International Union of Students (IUS), ‘Resolutions of the VIth IUS Congress’. Baghdad 1960, p. 59. 48. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘Yesterday and Today, Students of Iraq’, p. 9. 49. CADN, London, Embassy, No. 569, French Embassy (Baghdad) to French Embassy (London). Baghdad, 2 December 1952. 50. CADN, London, Embassy, No. 1337, Jacques Dumarçay, Ambassador of France (Baghdad) to His Excellency Minister of Foreign Affairs (Paris).

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‘DANGEROUS LIAISONS’ 51. Tamir Moustafa, ‘Conflict and Cooperation Between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000), pp. 3–22, 15; Migdal, State in Society. 52. Jordi Tejel Gorgas, ‘The limits of the state: Student protest in Egypt, Iraq and Turkey’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40/4 (2013), pp. 359–77. 53. Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p. 957. 54. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘Notes on Iraq by Bill Lee (USNSA representative in Paris)’, February 1961. 55. For a detailed account of this student strike see TNA, FO 371/170428/1016/4/ 63 (8 January 1963); NA, FO 371/170428/1016/1/63, 5 January 1963. 56. NA, FO 371/170428/EQ1015/15, Pamphlet issued by the Ba‘th Party in Baghdad, 8 January 1963. 57. NA, FO 371/170429/EQ1015/21, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 22 January 1963. NA, FO 371/170428/EQ1015/15, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 15 January 1963. 58. Ibid. 59. NA, FO 371/170428/EQ1015/24, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 29 January 1963. 60. NA, FO 371/170428/EQ1015/14, Memorandum written after discussion with Iraqi students, by Prof. E.F. Penrose, 17 January 1963. 61. Iraqi Communist Party, Iraqi Letter, 2–3 (February–March 1962), p. 25. 62. Kurdish Facts, No. 1–2, 1962. 63. Hoover Institution Archives, USNSA, Box 221, ‘Memorandum on the Iraqi situation’, August 1962. 64. NA, FO 371/170428/EQ1015/15, R.W. Munro to D.L.N. Goodchild, 15 January 1963. 65. ‘Clashes at Sharqiyah’, Al-Muwatin (Baghdadi newspaper established by Kamel al-Chaderchi), 18 January 1963. 66. Weldon C. Matthews, ‘The Kennedy administration, counterinsurgency, and Iraq’s first Ba‘thist regime’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (4) (2011), pp. 635–53. 67. Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p. 985.

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7 Assyrians and the Early Ba‘thist Period in Iraq: Between State and Non-State Actors1 Alda Benjamen and Sargon George Donabed

In the early 1960s Assyrians in Iraq began navigating a shifting political and demographic wind. In the midst of what was initially hailed as positive change for ethno-religious minorities under the new Qasim-led regime came a forced mass migration of many largely tribal Assyrians from their fastness in the mountains to predominantly Arab-dominated cities, as a result of the civil war. Some Kurdish leaders, unhappy with the slow movement of talks, began to push once again for more drastic anti-government positions while many tribal leaders and their followers began courting the regime in earnest, finding positions, especially as military irregulars. As talks ceased, Mustafa Barzani and his anti-government coalition, which included numerous Assyrians, saw flairs of skirmishes with government forces. It was then that government forces, predominantly anti-Barzani Kurds, began sacking villages throughout the northern region. Many of those villages attacked were either largely or solely inhabited by Assyrian families, who were forced to flee to other regions, the beginnings of an urbanisation process. Yet while the villages were mostly emptied of their native Assyrian populace, they were predominantly resettled by the very same Kurdish tribes working alongside the Iraqi regime. Thus while Kurds and Assyrians both felt the brunt of the urbanisation, the Assyrians were 156

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the sole demographic losers. The infighting and rural flight continued throughout the 1960s. In the interim, the country experienced a period of widespread civil unrest. After averting two coup d’états in July 1968, the Ba‘th party consolidated its power in the Iraqi political sphere.2 Although leading, without significant opposition, it was still wary of its two main political opponents, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP).3 As a result, in March 1970, the Iraqi government and Kurdish parties agreed on a peace accord that would grant the Kurds some semblance of autonomy and end the ongoing civil war. The accord recognised Kurdish as an official language and amended the constitution to state: ‘The Iraqi people are made up of two nationalities, the Arab nationality and the Kurdish nationality.’ Meanwhile, the ICP benefited from the associations established between the USSR and Iraq, especially in the wake of the Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation in April 1972. The warming relations between the USSR and Iraq, in addition to Iraq’s interest in drawing the ICP closer to its rule, justified the recognition of the ICP officially by the Iraqi state and its inclusion in the National Patriotic Front in 1973. The Ba‘th regime also extended ostensibly favourable policies to other minority communities, including the Assyrians. In 1972, Law 251 was issued giving ‘Syriac speaking citizens’ (i.e., the Christian members of the Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian Church of the East and Syriac/Orthodox Catholic and Catholic ecclesiastical communities), cultural and linguistic rights. These policies were reflective of the regime’s approaches to internal and external pressures exerted on it. Internally, the role of Assyrians in Iraqi oppositional parties and their transnational interactions with community members in neighbouring countries and regional governments was concerning. Externally, the regime was cautious concerning a vocal diaspora community in both North America and Europe. Following the Algiers Agreement, which settled border disputes between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Iran stopped supporting the Iraqi opposition, leading to the opposition’s demise. Contradictory policies by the regime towards the Assyrians began to be noticed, and included restrictions on the implementation of Law 251, and more obviously, an offensive which would destroy the way of life of their rural kin in the far north. 157

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This chapter examines relations between the state and the Assyrians, as well as Assyrians’ inclusion/exclusion during the early Ba‘thist rule (1968–80). Many of the sources employed intertwine oral interviews and primary sources in Assyrian and Arabic, both from within the community, and finally, archival sources. The interviews and print material from the Assyrian community provide a previously ignored/unutilised resource for Iraqi history from political actors, intellectuals, and combatants engaged in the period under discussion. The archival sources employed compliment the research agenda and method by providing a framework for the history of Iraq during this period. The chapter focuses on Ba‘thist policies, including the Algiers Agreement, which had greater implications for all of Iraq’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority groups. Power fluctuations and political dealings embedded in geo-political power struggles created a temporary space for smaller communities like the Assyrians to negotiate cultural and political rights and elevate issues of their community to the larger Iraqi sphere. Therefore it complicates the traditional view of the Ba‘th regime by demonstrating that it tactically employed certain conciliatory policies in the first decade of its rule instead of succumbing to repression. Further, it is an Assyrian attempt to negotiate this tenuous relationship with the state in urban regions and concurrently to navigate amongst Kurds, Communists and other non-state actors in the rural north that defines the essence of state and society relations in Iraq in the 1970s.

Possible Camaraderie and Potential Complications with the State During the period under discussion, the Iraqi government was wary of Assyrian–Kurdish dealings. They would court two of the most prominent Assyrian figures, the patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Eshai Shimun, and Upper Tiyari tribal chief, Malik Yaqo, former levy officer under the British mandate and son of former chief Malik Ismail.4 Both of these men had been exiled since the events of the Simele massacre in 1933. From their positions in the diaspora, Mar Eshai Shimun and Yaqo worked in concert with the anti-government movement staunchly seen among their Kurdish neighbours with whom they had a strong relationship 158

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with but more so with the Assyrian Universal Alliance, predominantly in Iran (creating the then most recent rendition of a national flag not five years before, in 1968) which was the most prominent and powerful diaspora organisation. On 24 April 1970, Mar Eshai Shimun was personally invited to meet President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in Baghdad. Upon the patriarch’s return, his Iraqi citizenship was reinstated and a crowd of 150,000 optimistic Assyrians welcomed him in the streets of Baghdad.5 The government’s efforts to gain the trust of the patriarch failed, and Mar Eshai Shimun left Iraq in less than a month’s after his arrival. He became disillusioned with the fruitless promises of the regime and declined to accept further invitations from them.6 Such reconciliation attempts continued for a year, while direct relations between the Kurds and the Iraqi government also deteriorated. In 1971 Mustafa Barzani began appealing in earnest to the United States for aid. Because of these events, the Assyrians saw an opportunity to emerge: when Baghdad granted the Kurds the option of autonomy in Arbil and Sulaymaniyah, the Assyrians engaged the Iraqi regime and vice versa. On 16 April 1972 Baghdad offered ‘Syriac-speaking nationals’ limited cultural rights through decree 251, as follows: (a) The Syriac language shall be the teaching language in all primary schools whose majority of pupils are from speakers in such language, and teaching of Arabic language shall be compulsory in such schools. (b) The Syriac language shall be taught in intermediate and secondary schools whose majority of pupils are from speakers in such language, and Arabic language shall be the teaching language in such schools. (c) The Syriac language shall be taught in the College of Arts at the University of Baghdad as one of the old languages. (d) Special programmes in the Syriac language shall be set up at the Broadcasting Service of the Republic of Iraq and at Kirkuk and Nineveh TV stations. (e) To issue a Syriac-language monthly magazine by the Ministry of Information. (f) To establish a society for Syriac-speaking writers, and ensure their representation in literary and cultural societies and the country. (g) To help Syriac-speaking writers and translators morally and materially by printing and publishing their cultural and literary works. 159

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(h) To enable Syriac-speaking nationals to open cultural and artistic clubs and formulate artistic and theatrical groups for reviving and evolving their legacy and popular arts. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council7

The law permitted the teaching of Syriac in schools where Assyrians were a majority, at the primary and secondary levels and also at the University of Baghdad’s College of Arts and Literature. This did not actually materialise. A special television and radio programme in Syriac was to be broadcast in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Nineveh, cities with large concentrations of Assyrians. Moreover, Assyrian writers and academics were to be represented in Iraqi cultural associations and financially supported to promote their own cultural and social organisations. Finally, the establishment of civil society organisations was permitted on the basis of social, cultural, artistic and linguistic objectives.8 Some of the significant organisations formed included:  the Union of Syriac Literates and Writers, with its seasonal magazine entitled al-Ittiḥād; the Cultural Organization, with its magazine Qālā Suryāyā; the Assembly of Syriac Language, which later joined the Scientific Iraqi Academy with their magazine Mujmaʿ al-lugha al-Surīāniyya; and the Assyrian Cultural Club, which existed before the formation of this law. Its magazine was entitled Mordinna Atouraya. Apram Shapera9 posits that these organisations were not permitted to use their ethnic name, Assyrian, but their linguistic title, Syriac, hence the Assyrian Cultural Club was eventually accused of being chauvinistic by the authorities and its members were persecuted. In 1974 the Baghdad athletic club Nādī al-Riyādhī al-Athūrī (Assyrian Sports Club), founded in 1955 and home of national soccer hero Ammo Baba, had its name compulsorily altered to Nādi al-Tamouz in honour of the 1968 July revolution that saw the rise to power of the Ba‘th party.10 Despite centralisation policies and governmental censorship of community organisations and printing presses, the Assyrians managed to publish important literary works produced in Arabic, which contributed to a crosscultural hybridisation between Iraqis of various backgrounds, but also in Assyrian (Assyrian-Aramaic, though referred to as Syriac in decree 251), the native language of the Assyrians.11 Production in their native tongue 160

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with the relative support of the government contributed to the revival and standardisation of the language across the various Eastern-Aramaic dialects spoken in Iraq (also in Iran and partially in Syria). Numerous important works were produced during this short period and the significant cultural clubs and organisations that were formed provided important venues for Assyrians to interact, socialise and perform plays, music, literary works and sports. An important intellectual class was formed in urban cities such as Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul, cities with large formerly rural Assyrian populations who had migrated to these urbanised centres for better employment and educational opportunities or to escape the instability and violence experienced in their villages resulting primarily from the autonomous uprising beginning in 1961.12

From Negotiating with the State to Navigating among Non-State Actors: State Response to Assyrian–Kurdish Relations Meanwhile, the KDP had gained international monetary support. Such aid from foreign allies to the Kurds made many of the already frustrated and tribally oriented Assyrians more likely to form a closer relationship with Mustafa Barzani and his troops. This was seen unmistakably during the summer of 1972, when both Iran and Israel increased monetary support to Kurds in Iraq. Furthermore, the United States, under the instructions of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, funnelled more than $16 million in CIA funds to the Kurds from 1972 to 1975.13 Much of this increase in aid followed the Iraqi–Soviet friendship treaty, signed in April 1972, which also saw the Iraqi government’s slight change in policy concerning the ICP. The United States regularly supported parties in opposition to Soviet control, and vice versa. Thus, the age-old struggle of foreign colonial powers over the Middle East would continue, but the previous positions of the French and British had now been supplanted by the Soviet Union and the United States, using pawns to contend for control and authority over Iraq. As well as with the patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, communication was established with certain community leaders who had also been exiled since the Simele Massacre. In 1973, Malik Yaqo was officially 161

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invited to return to Iraq and was designated by the authorities as the ‘Leader of the Assyrian People’.14 Yaqo and the Iraqi regime engaged in a mutual dialogue discussing position of the Assyrian community within a new Iraq.15 Among those in attendance with Yaqo were: Sam Andrews, representative of the Assyrian Universal Alliance; Mikhael Rasho, editor of the Assyrian Star; and Yaqo’s secretary and advisor Odisho Jindo, a graduate student at the American University of Beirut.16 The regime’s proposal to Yaqo was to fashion an Assyrian police force (reminiscent of the levies) in order to buffer all Kurdish advances.17 This became a bid by the government to solicit Assyrian aid against further Kurdish rebellion and to dissolve Assyrian participation in the Kurdish uprising. Iraqi officials began to isolate the possible problem elements, Kurds and Assyrians, and force their focus onto each other.

Yaqo’s Interview in Mordinna Atouraya Shortly following Malik Yaqo’s return to Iraq Mordinna Atouraya conducted an interview with Yaqo, presenting him to their readers as the ‘head of the Assyrian Nation’ (qawmiyya). Mordinna Atouraya, the organ of the Assyrian Cultural Club, was published in Baghdad from 1972 and until 1984. The magazine became the intellectual nucleus of Assyrian thought in the 1970s and was published in both Arabic and Assyrian. Articles in both language sections were submitted from various Iraqi provinces. The letters to the editor reflected the magazine’s popularity and broad regional and global readership. The Arabic section would have appealed to non-Assyrian readers as well; they were familiar with some Mordinna Atouraya writers, given their publication in popular Arab-language Iraqi newspapers.18 Articles on language and culture were highlighted in the magazine and were accepted mediums of discourse, as suggested in the language framing Law 251. Political matters were discussed cautiously, since the magazine was monitored and printed by the Ministry of Education.19 In the early 1970s Assyrian intellectuals of Mordinna Atouraya negotiated for political rights and challenged the authority of the state in subtle yet notable ways, using accepted governmental narratives.20 Writers also frequently utilised poetic metaphor to express social or political angst and frustration; yet others were unabashedly fearless in their longing.21 Such methods ensured 162

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that Assyrian narratives were protected and disseminated. Although sensitive topics like the Simele massacre of 1933 were approached carefully, and through the vantage point of language, generally writers told stories of the community that painted a positive and progressive past rather than one of failed strategies and promises. Accordingly, in an interview with Yaqo, Mordinna Atouraya focused on the theme of language, composing a dialogue, around the theme of literature and his role as an author. Issues of significance to the contemporary period were discussed from that vantage point, which was an unusual strategy given Yaqo’s fame as a military and political leader. The Simele massacre was introduced in relation to Yaqo:  ‘We have known Yaqo through his memoirs as a proficient military figure during the time of imperialism and the regressive monarchical rule.’ Yaqo, the author continued, struggled desperately during ‘the raging hurricane in 1933’. The author succeeded in delicately describing the events leading to the ‘persecution, displacement and hunger’ of his community members by placing the blame on imperialism and the Iraqi monarchy, while disregarding the role of the Iraqi army in the massacre. The term ‘massacre’ was avoided and no mention of the death of Assyrians in Simele and neighbouring villages was made.22 Nevertheless, it was significant that the Simele massacre was remembered in the press four decades later. The fact that Assyrians gave such primacy to the event, subtly in written sources and vocally in song and popular cultural displays, speaks to the importance of Simele in the historical memory of the community. The author skilfully intertwined linguistic elements with contemporary political issues, a method often used by Mordinna Atouraya’s contributors, who did not shy away from negotiating with the government on issues they deemed significant. Yaqo was asked about his impression on the use of ‘Speakers of the Syriac Language’ in reference to the Assyrian community in Law 251. In response he criticised the use of a language to depict a nation, stating: ‘The designation in its actuality, as it has been received, is incorrect because who ever coined it depended on the element of language on its own without contemplating on the spirit of nationality.’ He continued with the claim that he had never heard peoples referred to as ‘the speakers of the “al-fulāniyya”, or a certain language.’ He concluded:  ‘Although we might be divided denominationally, you will find us united nationally on being 163

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Assyrian’,23 reiterating that Yaqo’s conceptualisation of the Assyrian nation was inclusive of the religious ecclesiastical communities introduced earlier. With this interview Yaqo and the article’s author, Marwakil, were able to accomplish a few objectives. First, through the accepted medium of language an Assyrian military commander and political figure was given a platfor to negotiate for Assyrian rights, question certain aspects of the government’s policies and give prominence to his account of the Simele massacre, which had lead to his exile 40  years earlier. He was also able to clearly, though subtly, demonstrate to his community members that although he was an official government guest, working to an extent within the state apparatus, he had not compromised his independent position and was willing to and capable of advocating for the Assyrian cause and speaking freely against issues he disagreed with. This was clearly stated in his remarks on the official designation for the Assyrian community on the basis of their language. At the end of the interview he conveyed his hesitation by using the conditional ‘if ’, demonstrating to the readers of Mordinna Atouraya and likely government officials that they were still in the negotiation stages.24 Popular culture in the form of music and poetry became another important medium for intellectual and cultural production for Iraqi Assyrians, who mainly composed a ‘listening public’ or those non-literate in Assyrian-Aramaic, as opposed to literate Assyrians or those educated in their native tongue, comprising a ‘reading public’.25 This was an outcome of the community not being able, or allowed by state authorities, to consistently learn their language in a school setting, or to standardise it appropriately, hence a smaller percentage of the people were able to read their native tongue. Since the listening public did not need advanced reading and writing skills in their native tongue to be able to compose or listen to music, music became an important medium for intellectual and cultural production, utilised by varied segments of the population. With the flow of music across borders, via singers and cassette tapes, music’s influence on Assyrians transgressed national borders. The Assyrian Cultural Club in Baghdad was the centre for the development of Assyrian literature, popular culture and national aspirations.26 Born on 24 April 1950, Shlimon Bet-Shmuel, a member of the Assyrian Cultural Club, had a deep passion for music. On 2 August 1973, during 164

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a celebratory gathering for the third anniversary of the club, Bet-Shmuel performed the ballad ‘Simele’, a commemoration of the 1933 massacre.27 This song captured the community’s account and social memory of a watershed moment in Iraqi and Assyrian history, where the Iraqi army committed acts of mass murder and genocide against the Assyrian community in August 1933.28 Given that two Assyrian leaders associated with the Simele massacre, Mar Eshai Shimun and Malik Yaqo, had both recently been welcomed back by the Iraqi government, and treated initially as honoured official guests, Assyrians felt the need to publicly engage with the contentious memory of the Simele massacre. The song was ultimately an example of this negotiated space created by state–society relations. This song began with background sound of chaos, screams and people, apparently anticipating the massacre, wondering what to do.29 They ask:  ‘Shall we stay or escape? Is this not our country (i.e., question citizenship)?’ This foreshadowed what was to come:  the massacre, a word repeated 11 times throughout the song. Themes highlighted in this song included symbolism associated with brutality, chaos, death and survival. Symbolism associated with death and brutality pervaded the song. For instance: ‘Children are crying on the bodies of their dead mothers’, ‘silent corpses’, ‘plains and mountains have turned crimson’ (with blood). The clear description given by the singer, reflecting the social memory of the community, is that a massacre involving innocent children and women took place, not the killing of rebellious armed men. This would have been counter to governmental accounts from the 1930s, which represented the massacre as the suppression of a militia challenging the sovereignty of the Iraqi state.30 Chaos, the second theme, was depicted by the alteration of the assumed natural order – relatives renouncing each other to save themselves, children dying before their parents, people screaming, the dead interfering and mourning on behalf of the living, who will soon be killed. All these depictions paint a clear chaotic image of the massacre of Simele. Finally, the motif of survival was presented in two ways. One, Simele was labelled a ‘sacrifice’ for the Assyrian cause and national aspirations:  ‘A thousand Simeles and the sacrifice is small for the one who wants to see the blessed day.’ Second, the motif of survival of the nation was clearly stated: ‘Say that Assyria is alive and will continue to be. Let all creation hear this call.’ Due 165

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to increased government harassment and threats in response to promoting Assyrian nationalist sentiment, Bet-Shmuel soon fled to Iran and eventually the United States. I didn’t leave Iraq because I wanted to. We left because I was put in prison and badly tortured for a month for singing an Assyrian nationalistic song at a party. Just before I was released, one of the Ba‘th officers in charge told me that he would be expecting weekly communication from me detailing the nationalistic activities of our community – in particular those who were meeting in the Assyrian Culture Club.31

One Gives and One Takes Away: Challenges in a Rural North Despite the growth of urban individual and community activity by taking advantage of the 1972 decree, the regime played a vastly different game in the rural north. Mustafa Barzani, having at different times secured Israeli, US and Iranian backing since the 1960s, made a play for greater power in the early 1970s.32 This backing, probably due to Barzani’s anti-communist tendencies and the Ba‘th regime’s kinder treatment of the Iraqi Communist Party for a brief period, allowed those Kurds involved in the struggle to take up arms against the government once again. When Iran’s support for the Kurds had begun to diminish, at least on the surface, the involvement of Iran’s secret service, SAVAK, on the other hand, continued in earnest. In addition, Israel persuaded Mustafa Barzani to begin a new offensive against the Iraqi army in 1973  – some sources believe, to keep the Kurds occupied and unable to support the Syrian army on the Golan front.33 Violence was renewed from Kirkuk to Sinjar. At Khanaqin on 18 August two Iraqi military men and ten Kurds were killed in skirmishes along the Iranian border.34 According to a telegram from US intelligence, an intercepted telegram from the KDP politburo to the Revolutionary Command Council (the ultimate decision making body in Iraq) reported that the fighting in Sinjar had worsened. The KDP promised that if the attacks did not stop there would be repercussions.35 The situation deteriorated as the months wore on, with little hope of reconciliation and no end in sight. Indeed more infighting occurred. On 11 November, 166

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using a peşmerge force 2,000 strong, the KDP reportedly launched attacks against communist villages in Sulaymaniyah. The KDP in turn accused the communists of receiving arms and ammunition from the Iraqi government and attacking the KDP headquarters at Darbandikhan.36 In March 1974 the Iraqi government engaged directly with Barzani, completed a draft autonomy agreement and allotted two weeks for a KDP response. The KDP rejected the agreement, which would have left the oilfields of Kirkuk under Iraqi government control. Some experts have speculated that a solution to the Kurdish question in Iraq was greatly imperilled by ‘the increased Iranian–US–Israeli support for Barzani’.37 Israel’s Mossad continued close relations and collaborated further on issues concerning Iraqi Kurds through the mid-1970s, at which time hostilities resumed between the Barzani Kurds and the Iraqi government, causing internal fighting and forced demographic displacement, especially in the Zakho region on the Turkish border. Pro-Barzani Kurds, Assyrians and communists were among the various non-state actors of the period. While the Kurds and communists received the majority of regional and international aid, the Assyrians made a strong case for their own desires. The more numerous Kurds began to absorb the Assyrian struggle more powerfully in the 1970s. To that effect, a new committee was associated with it (in 1972) known as the High Committee of Christian Affairs, headed by Gewargis Chikko, brother of the late commander of the Assyrian battalions in the 1960s, Hurmiz Malik Chikko. Gewargis Chikko worked in concert with Barzani’s opposition, providing aid to non-combatants in the struggle as well as general aid for the Assyrians. By the title of the committee, it became obvious the Assyrians had lost much of their independent agency as such and had become more entrenched within the ‘Kurdish cause’, rather than alongside it as a separate entity. Gewargis Chikko himself recognised they would need external support, but for all his courting efforts, the United States made it clear that as policy they would not intervene in the internal issues of another country.38 Iran continued to assert significant influence over Iraq and its various communities. This was unmistakable following the Algiers Agreement on 6 March 1975, an accord between Iraq and Iran created in order to settle border disputes. The support, more specifically from Iran, ceased immediately following the signing of the treaty, with the settling of border disputes 167

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and the beginning of what became known in Iraq as the border clearings in the rural north. During this time of uncertainty, and particularly in the wake of the defeat of Barzani’s leadership of the KDP, in June 1975 a former leading member of the KDP politburo, Jalal Talabani, along with some Marxist and socialist-leaning Kurds, formed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) while in Damascus.39 Future years would witness great friction between the newly formed progressive PUK and the predominantly tribal Barzani-led KDP. As a consequence, serious fighting erupted between KDP and PUK militia, which affected not only Kurds but also those Assyrians caught in the crossfire.

A Double-Edged Sword As a deterrent to potential Assyrian re-involvement in a rebellion with the still largely externally funded Kurds, the Ba‘th regime took various measures to ensure their neutrality as well as to pacify a growing antigovernment sentiment. The regime feared a fight on two fronts and concocted a plan permitting them to control the centres of religious/cultural education. They achieved this by actively nationalising all schools in Iraq, from predominantly Shi‘a establishments in the south to Christian parochial schools in large urban areas and throughout the north.40 Most foreigners were deported, and priests and nuns were forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the Ba‘th regime. The nationalisation programme, framed in decree 251, succeeded in tempering the government-feared increase of growing Assyrian intellectualism and nationalism in urban areas by effectively eliminating many religiously based Assyrian schools that had offered language, history and cultural classes – notwithstanding sections (a) and (b) of decree 251, as shown above. The decree applied to all the private/parochial schools, including the al-Taqaddum (Qasha Khando) School, quashing the numerous efforts at promoting cultural legacies, something individuals accomplished through the avenue of religious institutions.41 Once all the schools were compulsorily made public, Assyrians no longer comprised a majority in their own parochial schools, effectively negating any benefit they might have drawn from decree 251. The decree, it appeared, had a built in failsafe, and the regime was quick to utilise it. 168

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Though the 1972 decree gave the community a variety of progressive avenues to pursue, as time progressed privileges were reduced and funding for radio and academic/print media was curtailed. In some cases, organisations were impaired by the influence of government supporters embedded in the strata of the association.42 The one-hour radio broadcast in Assyrian was eventually usurped by Ba‘thists and used for pro-party propaganda, while those who spoke out against the governmental influence were deemed noncompliant or in opposition to the party’s ideological views and promptly removed.43 The cultural-linguistic association, the Syriac Academy, with its publication of a literary and poetry journal entitled Qala Suryaya, was infiltrated, politicising the group’s academic and cultural activities.44 The turnaround coincided most strongly with the Algiers Agreement between Iraq and Iran on 6 March 1975. The agreement drastically stopped the flow of Iranian support directly to the Kurds, making Assyrian physical involvement as a possible buffer force or enclave far less crucial. Finally, this reality added to the previously damaging consequences of the rural demographic displacement of the 1960s, much of it undertaken by progovernment Kurdish forces, who later resettled the region, exponentially adding to rural territorial losses. More than 98 villages, 75 religious and educational structures, bastions of a largely independent lifestyle, were eliminated in the rural north, concentrated largely in the Zakho region around 1974 and the Barwari Bala sub-district between 1977 and 1978. Essentially, such government-enacted policies forced over 1,200 Assyrian families to become internally and externally displaced by 1979. There are numerous examples of the physical, social and cultural devastation in the more rural north, in particular in the Barwari region of Dohuk province during the mid-eighteenth century. At the time in question, the Barwari Bala region of northern Iraq contained around 80 villages. Of these, 35 were entirely inhabited by Assyrians during the 1970s. The region is principally mountainous, and many villages remained inaccessible by conventional means. The region is bordered by Turkey to the north and the Sapna valley to the south, and rests between the Greater Zab river to the west and the River Khabur to the east.45 This remoteness allowed the retention of a unique identity and lifestyle distinct from families in urban centres. Furthermore, the Barwar region was a historic Assyrian Church of the East enclave in Iraq. 169

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The border clearings would devastate almost every village in the region, along with the symbols of their cultural heritage. Under the terms of the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq began to clear a cordon sanitaire along its northern borders, in particular with Iran. Initially a 5 km wide corridor was created, later expanded to 10, then 15 and eventually 30 km of desolation.46 Families were removed from the region to be settled, with few belongings, in mujamma’āt or collective towns further south, while their villages and churches were dynamited and bulldozed.47 According to Ba‘th sources, some 28,000 families were removed from their villages in two months in 1978, or approximately 140,000 Assyrians (assuming five people per family), and half a million Kurds were also removed from their villages and eventually resettled in collective towns.48 A look at the historical village of Dūre along the border of Iraq and Turkey, not far from pre-World War I Lower Tiyari tribal Assyrian villages of Līzān and Zerni with which it shares many ancestral ties, is a prime example of the extent of damage and loss. The region is a mecca for ancient sites, including the remains of a fortress on the western mountain that gives some insight into the probable etymology of the village name – perhaps related to Akkadian-Assyrian dūrum ‘fortress’. The region had already been emptied of half its population in the 1850s.49 These violent episodes were comparable to the massacres of Christians in Lebanon and Damascus in the mid-1800s.50 Not long after, the ancestors of the Dūre were massacres continued in the Hakkâri region by the Kurdish tribal chief Bedr Khan Beg in 1843–6, illustrating the demographic changes in the mountains surrounding Mosul, resulting from a significant decline in the Assyrian populations in Hakkâri and Mosul, and the loss of Assyrian independence and autonomy within Hakkâri’s established tribal system.51 Dūre had long been important as both a religious and cultural location, as well as an epicentre of natural resources. It is home to the gippa d-miyya, ‘cave of water’, which is said to contain ancient wall paintings, and the gippa d-dermana, ‘cave of medicinal compounds’, named for its concentration of potassium nitrate and what is probably sulphur, both key components in the production of gunpowder.52 By World War I the village was home to about 200 inhabitants. During the war, 30 of its residents were either killed or abducted (specifically women and children) and 90 died in the vicinity of Urmia.53 In 1938, 35 families, along with 348 goats 170

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and 195 sheep, lived in the village.54 By 1957 village population totalled 296 people. Due to its strategic importance, the village took the brunt of a napalm attack by government planes in 1968, along with other Assyrian villages of the Barwar region. Prior to its demolition on 8 August 1978, 100 families (75 households) lived in Dūre.55 Thirteen bishops sat on the episcopal see of Dūre in recent history, making the village a significant religious centre of Eastern Christianity. The Church of the East bishop Mar Youalah (Yab-Alaha) occupied his episcopal see in Dūre until the 1970s as the last bishop to carry the name Youalah. He was allegedly poisoned in 1972 by either the state authorities or Kurdish oppositional officials. In 1850, Dūre was home to between 20 and 40 families with four priests serving two ancient churches.56 The village also had a school and its two churches – Mar Gewargis (first built in 909) and the fourth-century monastery of Mar Qayyoma, known also as the burial place of eight or nine bishops of the Church of the East. Some of church manuscripts have been preserved, including ‘The usefulness of Aristotle’s writings’, dated to 1224, which speaks to the long cultural and intellectual history of the region.57 Two shrines, to Mart Maryam and Mar Pius, and four cemeteries were situated within the village. The churches, along with all the houses, were first dynamited and then bulldozed by the Iraq regime during the border clearings of the late 1970s. Simultaneously, the entirety of the village’s farms and apple orchards were burned.58 Though some villagers were offered recompense for their homes after their removal from the region in the late 1970s, it was a paltry sum in comparison with the destruction. Many of the families were sent to the collective town (mujamma’āt) or resettlement camp of Baṭufa, further evidence of the ethnic cleansing campaign.59 The village was also the birthplace of Ethniel Shleimon, considered the first martyr of the 1961 armed resistance movement fighting the Iraqi state alongside Kurds, communists and others.

Conclusion This chapter elucidates contradictions, from association to conflict, in state–society relations between Assyrians (in both the communal and individual sense) and the state. The largely urban populations and their 171

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prowess, illustrated by the rise of Assyrian cultural clubs and activities, increased production of literature, as did decree 251 of 16 April 1972, when Baghdad offered ‘Syriac-speaking nationals’ limited cultural rights. This was in contrast to the elimination of independent rural life in the northern regions by destroying villages, forcibly removing populations, creating collective towns, burning orchards and bulldozing farms and churches, all markers of historical cultural significance. Ironically this would vastly increase Kurdish presence in the region as the Assyrian villages were emptied, certainly not Iraqi governments’ intended consequence. Indeed, the inconsistent nature of the actions seemed paradoxical without an understanding of a far more intricate situation of major power politics including the struggles pre- and post-Algiers Agreement, affecting a much larger area, with greater implications for all of Iraq’s various ethnic, religious, linguistic and political groups. Ultimately, the 1970s saw the Assyrian community not without its own agency, navigate and negotiate between state and non-state actors in both urban and rural regions of Iraq.

Notes 1. Some sections of this chapter are taken from or based on Sargon George Donabed’s Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the 20th Century (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2015), as well as Alda Benjamen’s ‘Negotiating the place of Assyrians in modern Iraq’, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2015. 2. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 186–91. 3. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), p. 126. 4. The word Malik in this context translates to an Assyrian tribal chief. Malik Yaqo was the leader of the Upper Tiyari tribe, which originated Hakkâri, Turkey. 5. Apram Shapera, al-Ashūrīyūn fī al-Fikr al-ʻIrāqī al-Muʻāṣir [The Assyrians in Contemporary Iraqi Thought] (London: Saqi Books, 2001), p. 35. 6. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Mar Eshai Shimun was assassinated in 1975 in California. 7. Iraq Ministry of Information, 1974, pp.  11–12. The formation of the Syriac Academy is dealt with on pp. 21–30. 8. Shapera, al-Ashūrīyūn fī al-Fikr al-ʻIrāqī al-Muʻāṣir, pp. 42–53. 9. Ibid.

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ASSYRIANS AND THE EARLY BA‘THIST PERIOD IN IRAQ 10. It was changed back in 1987 due to continued protests from supporters and fans. 11. The distinction is relative yet vital to elucidate. Syriac is generally reserved for the liturgical language of most of the Eastern Churches from the Assyrian Church of the East to the Maronites in Lebanon. Assyrian–Aramaic or Modern Assyrian (considered by scholars to be part of the North-east Neo-Aramaic grouping) is the everyday language spoken by those in Iraq, Turkey (until their expulsion), Syria and Iran. 12. For an analysis of rural-urban migrations of Assyrians in the 1950s see Benjamen’s ‘Negotiating the place of Assyrians in modern Iraq’, pp.  38–52, which sheds light on the role of Assyrians in labour unions and the Iraqi Communist Party in Kirkuk’s Iraq Petroleum Company. For a study of Assyrian village destruction in the 1960s, see Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, pp. 138–68. 13. Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: The Untold History of Israeli Intelligence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 328. 14. The Ba‘thist Iraqi regime’s conceptualisation of the Assyrian identity had not been fully established in the early 1970s. In the mid-to-late 1970s, the term ‘Ashuri’, and later ‘Athuri’ in Arabic, came to be used in Iraqi parlance solely for members of the Assyrian Church of the East and predominantly for those who had settled in Iraq post-World War I. 15. Vahram Petrosian, ‘Assyrians in Iraq’, Iran and the Caucasus 10/1 (2006), pp. 113–47, 134. 16. Ashor Giwargis, ‘Until when? The Assyrian ethnicity persecuted and marginalized in its own homeland’, Zinda Magazine, 30 September 2002; O.G., personal communication, 2 January 2013. 17. The Iraq Levies were a mandate security force created by the British though made up of local fighting men. 18. Benjamen, ‘Negotiating the place of Assyrians in modern Iraq’, pp. 170–213. 19. See for example Akhtiyar Benyamin Mushe’s article on language, ‘Leshanā dYimmā’, Mordinna Atouraya 3.11 (1977), pp. 41–3. Mushe was a prolific writer, also translating works such as The Merchant of Venice into Assyrian. 20. Assyrian intellectuals negotiated for additional political rights by weaving their community into Ba‘thist propagated historical narratives of socialism and Abbasidism:  Benjamen, ‘Negotiating the place of Assyrians in modern Iraq’, pp. 170–213. 21. This is beyond the scope of this work, but deserves a mention since it illustrates the paradox of ‘cultural rights’ as offered by the Ba‘th. See Khaziqaya Israel, ‘Freedom’, Mordinna Atouraya [The Literate/Learned Assyrian] 1.3/4 (1974), pp. 12–13.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 22. Mīkhā’īl Marwakil, ‘Ra’īs al-Qawmiyya al-Athūriyya yataḥadath ‘an ḥayatihi al-’adabiyya’, Mordinna Atouraya 2/1 (1973), pp. 37–9, 37. 23. Ibid., p. 39. 24. During this interview Yaqo also reflected on his time spent in exile and his written historical accounts of the World War I period. For a complete analysis of Yaqo’s interview with Marwakil see Benjamen, ‘Negotiating the place of Assyrians in modern Iraq’, pp. 223–30. 25. Stephen Blum and Amir Hassanpour, ‘“The morning of Freedom Rose up”:  Kurdish popular song and the exigencies of cultural survival’, Popular Music 15/3 (1996), pp. 325–43. 26. Apram Shapera, The Assyrian Cultural Club:  March of Challenges and Achievements 1970–1980 (Chicago: Maṭba’at Alfā Ghrāfīk, 1993), pp. 95–105. 27. Alda Benjamen, ‘“Songs of Defiance”: oral history through music’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Boston, 2009. The paper focused on Iraqi Assyrian songs produced in the second half of the twentieth century: Esha Emmanuel Tamras, ‘Shlimon Bet-Shmuel: biography’, 2003. Available at http://www.shlimonbetshmuel.com/biography.html (accessed 9 April 2011). 28. See Tripp, A History of Iraq, pp.  82–3. Also R.S. Stafford, The Tragedy of the Assyrians [1935], Assyrian International News Agency, Books Online. Available at http://www.aina.org/books/tota.htm (accessed 11 December 2007). Donabed elucidates the events of Simele in narrative form in Reforging a Forgotten History, Chapter 3 and analysed in Chapter 7, giving special attention to Assyrian oral history and the ethnic cleansing component of Simele. 29. Shlimon Bet Shmuel, ‘Simele’, released 1 April 1974. Available at http:// www.qeenatha.com/albums/ShlimonBetShmuel/Simele/1027/ (accessed 20 November 2014). 30. For the Iraqi government’s narrative on the Simele massacre see, Khaldun S. Husry, ‘ The Assyrian affair of 1933 (I)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5/2 (1974), pp. 161–76, 344–60. Khaldun Husry was the son of Arab nationalist Sati’ al-Husry, who worked on the Iraqi school curriculum and had relationships with members of the Iraqi government. Khaldun Husry used an approving tone with regard to the position of the Iraqi monarchy and the army in the Simele affair. He also disclosed his personal relationship with Colonel Bakr Sidqi, the commander responsible for the massacre in Simele. 31. Tony Kasim, ‘An interview with Sami Yako’, Nineveh Magazine 30/1–2 (2007), p. 23. 32. George Black, Genocide in Iraq:  The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), p. 6. 33. Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars, p. 329.

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ASSYRIANS AND THE EARLY BA‘THIST PERIOD IN IRAQ 34. US Intelligence Baghdad, Iraq to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, ‘Deterioration of government of Iraq–Kurdish relations’, 26 August 1973, Wikileaks. 35. US Intelligence Baghdad, Iraq to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, ‘Kurdish Conflict’, 28 August 1973, Wikileaks. 36. US Intelligence Baghdad, Iraq to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, ‘Kurdish– Communist Clashes’, 18 November 1973, Wikileaks. 37. Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars, p. 330. 38. Department of State to Iran Tehran, Lebanon Beirut, ‘Request for Aid to Assyrians’, 9 May 1974, Wikileaks. 39. Gareth Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan:  Political Development and Emergent Democracy (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 80. 40. Ray Mouawad, ‘Syria and Iraq:  repression  – disappearing Christians of the Middle East’, Middle East Quarterly 8/1 (Winter 2001), pp. 51–60. 41. Y.C., personal communication, 1 September 2006. 42. Shapera, The Assyrian Cultural Club, pp. 53–4. 43. Y.C., personal communication, 1 September 2006. 44. Ibid. 45. S.A., personal communication, 2 July 2007. 46. Black, Genocide in Iraq, p. 37. 47. S.A., personal communication, 2 July 2007. 48. Al-Thawra, 18 September 1978. For more on the uprooting of the Kurdish population, see Tripp, History of Iraq, 206. 49. George Percy Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals [1852], 2 vols, vol. 1 (London: Darf Publishers, 1987), p. 381. 50. Sarah Shields, Mosul before Iraq:  Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 51–64. 51. Hirmis Aboona, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire (Amherst:  Cambria Press, 2008), pp. 169–95. Shields argues that Bedr Khan’s rise to power and subsequent downfall exemplify what she terms ‘midcentury issues’, namely:  ‘The process of centralization, the imposition of new taxes, the effects of the changing roles of the Christians, and the consequences of the growing foreign presence in the province. The Ottoman efforts to retake direct control and reform the empire took on different meanings as the central government extended its power into the mountains near Mosul’: Shields, Mosul before Iraq, p. 51. 52. K.S., personal communication, 24 February 2008. 53. William Walker Rockwell, The Pitiful Plight of the Assyrian Christians in Persia and Kurdistan (New  York:  American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, 1916), p. 54.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 54. League of Nations, Communication from the Government of Iraq, C.296.M.172.1938.VII, ‘Report on the economic conditions of the Assyrians in the Northern Provinces in Iraq’, Geneva, 10 September 1938, pp. 1–31, 10. 55. Assyrian Academic Society, Report, ‘Field mission Iraq’, 2004. 56. Francis N. Heazell and Jessie P. Margoliouth (eds), Kurds and Christians (London: Wells Gardner & Co., 1913), pp. 151–2. 57. J.C.J. Sanders, Assyrian-Chaldean Christians in Eastern Turkey and Iran: Their Last Homeland Re-charted (Hernen, The Netherlands:  A.A. Brediusstichting, 1997), p. 65. 58. Odisho, Amir, ‘Dūrī’, al-Fikr al-Masihi [The Christian Thought] (July–September, 1996), pp. 24–5. 59. K.S., personal communication, 24 February 2008.

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8 Ba‘thi Iraq in the 1970s: Historiography of Medieval Islam and Contemporary Politics1 Amatzia Baram

This chapter offers a contemporary political interpretation of articles and books published in Iraq that ostensibly dealt with medieval Islamic history.2 It examines a limited period, beginning with the rise of the Ba‘th party to power in 1968. It ends in 1980, as the war against Iran changed the political-intellectual climate in the country to such an extent that anything that happened after 1980 may be seen as a new era. An even more profound change has been taking place since after the Ba‘th Party was removed from power. Studying the earlier era, between the creation of the Iraqi state in 1920 and the rise of the Ba‘th to power is also of great interest. Indeed, I hope that this chapter – dealing as it does with a brief, though very lively, intellectual period – will open the topic of Iraqi historiography of the Islamic medieval era to a much wider study. It may be argued that the historiographic duel described below was not, as I believe the case to be, between a Marxist or quasi-Marxist ‘left’, together with communists, who included a few secular Shi‘a scholars, and a Sunni-dominated, secular, Iraq-centred Arab nationalist ‘right’. Rather, it may be argued that it was a heated debate between individual historians representing themselves. Until we find the relevant internal documents this will remain debatable. However, in a regime controlled by a highly ideological, Sunni-hegemonic party, and at a time when the regime 177

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was challenged by a Shi‘a religious opposition on the one hand and the Iraqi Communist Party and the ‘leftist’ Syrian Alawite-hegemonic Ba‘th regime on the other, and when an internal ideological battle raged inside the party between ‘left’ and ‘right’, it is very likely that the debate analysed below reflects political rather than individual differences. Furthermore articles with an identical Marxist anti-Abbasid pro-Shi‘a proclivity were also published in the legal communist magazines and they were similarly countered by centrist, or ‘right wing’ Ba‘thi historians.3 The reader is invited to judge. Until the mid-1970s both Ba‘thi and regime-sponsored Marxistinclined intellectuals were allowed, even encouraged, to publish articles that flaunted elements of Marxist philosophy.4 There were two main messages that the Ba‘th leadership wanted to deliver during those years. The first was secularism. Sometimes the authors also added barely-disguised atheism for good measure. The Iraqi Ba‘th were no Marxists and officially speaking objected to atheism (al-ilhad). Yet, in their highbrow literature some Marxist concepts were welcome, because they presented the Baghdad regime as no less leftist, modern and progressive than its despised twin across the border in Damascus and the Iraqi Communist Party that, in those years, was still a prestigious rival at home. The second message was revolution. The Ba‘th regime defined itself incessantly as representing a total political and social revolution. The term ‘revolution’ (al-thawra) was as ubiquitous as ‘Arab’ or ‘pan-Arab nationalism’ (al-qawmiyya al-arabiyya). Indeed, the party’s daily newspaper was called Al-Thawra and the party’s internal magazine, limited to the narrow circle of full members (the top of four membership ranks), was Al-Thawra al-Arabiyya. The revolutionary zeal was designed to justify the Ba‘th coup d’état of July 1968 and the extreme brutality of party rule afterward. Things were so bad before July 1968, the party insisted, that an ongoing ‘revolution’, sometimes defined as a ‘permanent revolution’ (al-thawra al-da’ima) was unavoidable.5 The ‘revolution’ was thus directed, in the first place, against the legacy of all the previous regimes in Iraq: the monarchy that represented the ‘comprador’ social classes, mainly the ‘great bourgeois’ and ‘feudalists’ who ‘collaborated’ with the foreign ‘imperialists’; the Qasim regime, that ‘betrayed pan-Arabism’, and the regime of the ‘Arif brothers that, like its Egyptian ally under Gamal Abd al-Nasir represented 178

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petty-bourgeois mentality that explained their defeat to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. The Syrian ‘apostate’ regime that reneged on Ba‘thi principles was the worst. The revolutionary status Baghdad claimed to itself was also directed against the pro-Western Arab regimes like the Saudi, Jordanian and Kuwaiti, and against the pro-American Shah of Iran. On the social level the revolution was meant to subdue the competing elites, the ‘cosmopolitical’ communists, the Shi‘a and Sunni clerics and the tribal shaykhs. It was meant to catapult society from religious ‘superstitioun’ and tribal ‘backwardness’ to a modern and ‘progressive’ society, infused with Ba‘th-style socialism, Arab nationalism and secularism. Due to their atheistic hints, publishing such sensational articles was a risky practice. True, they came out only in highbrow intellectual magazines that the general public was not in the habit of reading. They were designed to serve as part of the internal discourse among senior party officials and their intellectual/academic colleagues and as guidelines for schoolmasters and senior teachers. They were also sent to Beirut to be disseminated in the Arab world but there they were read by similar audiences – secular leftist intellectuals. However, inside Iraq these magazines were not classified, as were some party publications (like al-Thawra al-Arabiyya). They were also easily accessible to anyone in any college and public library. This means that the regime exposed itself to criticism, even to violent demonstrations by conservative circles, Sunni as well as Shi‘a. And yet, during their first years in power the party leaders were exceptionally confrontational and did not hesitate to allow such provocative views to appear in semi-official magazines. Most surprising was yet another characteristic of these publications: the revolutionary spirit expressed in them transcended the modern age and sent deep roots into medieval Islamic history. Through a Marxist-style historiography the regime’s intellectuals, concentrated mainly (though not exclusively) in Al-Muthaqqaf al-Arabi (The Arab Intellectual), a well-funded monthly magazine, assaulted both the Umayyad and Abbasid ruling dynasties. As befits leftist social revolutionaries, they described almost every medieval anti-caliphate revolt, including clear-cut religious-political ones, as an expression of progressive social protest against class oppression. The fact that many of those revolts were influenced by Shi‘a ideology and that the ruling dynasties were Sunni may have been somewhat embarrassing 179

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for the mainly Sunni party leadership, but revolution trumped sect almost every time. The need to demonstrate revolutionary socialism also defined the attitude to the Caliphs and Caliphate. While criticising the Damascusbased Umayyads was acceptable in Ba‘thi Iraq, criticism of the Baghdadbased Abbasids was rare. And yet the need to legitimise their ‘revolution’ drove the Ba‘th to allow support for almost any revolution in medieval Islamic history, including against the Abbasids. Gradually, however, in the mid-1970s the Ba‘th regime began to internalise the fact that, ‘revolution’ or not, it was actually a ruling regime very much in power, and that it was challenged continuously by Shi‘a Islamist revolutionaries. The years 1974, and especially 1977, saw major Shi‘a disturbances. Any support for a revolutionary medieval movement, certainly a Shi‘a-inclined one that rose against the Sunni Abbasid caliphate, could easily be interpreted as legitimising anti-Ba‘thi revolts. Regime-sponsored historians thus performed a U-turn. They began to make use of Iraqi intellectual magazines, mainly the new Aafaq Arabiyya, which came to replace al-Muthaqqaf al-’Arabi, in order to refute all claims that those movements were ‘progressive’ ones, seeking some kind of social or national liberation from the yoke of an oppressive Arab caliphate. They presented the caliphate in a new and positive light and the revolutionaries as anti-Arab, reactionary and inhumane. Indeed, some anti-Abbasid revolutionaries were even branded wicked haters of Arabism and Islam. This protection of early Medieval Islam by a regime that did so much to limit the influence of Islam in daily life in Iraq and even declared the Sharia null and void6 looks like a contradiction, and so it was. However, rather than a heavenly creed, to the secular Ba‘this early Islam represented the unifying ideology of the Arab ‘nation’ during the golden age and, as such, it could not be separated from the glory that were the Arabs especially under the Prophet and the Abbasids. Both from Aflaq’s lectures in the 1940s and 1950s and from Saddam’s in the late 1970s one could deduce that, in the early Middle Ages Islam was suitable for life. In Ba‘thi thinking, early Islam represented the spirit of the Arabs then, as did Ba‘thi ideology in the modern age. As they saw it, the Ba‘th doctrine came to replace Islam rather than to relegate it to oblivion. Islam as history remained of great emotional importance to the Ba‘this. Furthermore, for a regime that identified itself increasingly with the Baghdad-based Sunni Arab Abbasid caliphate, any enemy of the 180

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caliphate was also an enemy of the Arabs and thus of Arab-hegemonic Islam. Additionally, as will be shown below, sometimes Ba‘thi intellectuals went even further in their endeavour to protect the reputation of early Islam when they described it as a carbon copy of the Ba‘th itself: secular, rational, scientific, socialistic and open to dialogue with other civilisations. This way they also tried to legitimise the Ba‘th in the eyes of traditionalists: after all, they implied, original Islam looked exactly like us today! All this meant that, by the late 1970s, it was already difficult to find in regime-sponsored historiography any support for anti-caliphate movements. Extreme secularism and even hints of atheism continued to appear in academic works until 1980. It is possible that an additional reason for the change in historiography, mainly the preference given to Arab rule over social revolution, was a change at the top leadership of the Ba‘th Party. In 1973, following an attempted internal coup d’état, a leading member, Abd al-Khaliq al-Samarra’i, was jailed. His supporters, like the ideologue ‘Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim, too, were removed from positions of influence. This group was very close to the thinking of George Habash and his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Their main ideological preferences was a Trotskyite-style ‘permanent Arab revoluton’. They preferred the liberation of Palestine over Iraqi interests. They were also influenced by Marxism in their social thinking while Saddam Husayn’s circle were Iraq-firsters, their emotional attachment to the glory that was the Baghdad-based Abbasid empire was profound, and their socialism was closer to the concept of a welfare state.7 Both factions were very secular, verging on atheism, though. It is not clear therefore that there is direct connection between al-Samarra’i’s arrest and the end of atheist historiography. What seems to be the case is that when Marxist-inclined intellectuals disappeared, their atheism, too, disappeared. There is also evidence that in the second half of the 1970s Saddam reached the conclusion that explicit expressions of atheism, even if in high-brow magazines, were hurting the regime. This, however, did not stop him from declaring in 1977 that only reactionaries were building modern life on ‘the teachings of ancient jurisprudence’.8 Finally, in the course of delegitimising almost all the medieval revolutionary movements of the Islamic world, some historians went even further. They implied that the Shi‘a-like eschatology that served many 181

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of those revolutionary movements was illegitimate, because it was based on Persian heathen concepts. The fact that the Abbasids themselves used Shi‘a ideological elements in their anti-Umayyad propaganda did not seem to bother them. However, all this remained in the realm of highbrow intellectual discourse, meant for Sunni and Shi‘a party officials and high school and university teachers. On the popular level the regime presented a very different face. It tried to lure the Shi‘a masses by showing great respect for Shi‘a historical heroes and by supporting the main Shi‘a shrines.

Medieval History and Atheism A few examples may demonstrate the length to which, until the mid-1970s, regime-sponsored historians went in asserting its staunch secularism to the point of atheism. One example is the treatment of the Zandaqa, an intellectual medieval movement widely considered to be atheistic or, at least, agnostic. In an article published by the historian Muhammad Mubarak in 1970 in the Ba‘thi intellectual flagship Muthaqqaf al-’Arabi, the author suggested that in the modern age, what the Arabs need was ‘posing reason as a contradiction to aqidah (belief, but in this context also: religion) and to believe in reason’.9 This is what the Zandaqa offered in the eighth and ninth centuries ad. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Muhammad Mubarak was telling us, the intellectual servants of the rulers said: ‘He who adopted logic [or: studied logic] became a Zindiq [an atheist who pretended to be religious]’ (man tamantaqa tazandaqa). This expressed ‘the fears of the rulers from spreading the rules of logic because this would lead, God forbid, to the release of Man’s head from the bridal of petrified faith/religion’. In turn, this could lead to a social revolution like that of the Zanj (see below), because alaqidah (‘faith’, read: the Islamic faith) served to enslave people. This also means that man (rather than God?) is ‘the active, the speaker, the capable, in control’. Today, the author insisted, the Arabs had to strive ‘so that the remnants of inability and despair and passivity (stemming from religion?) … would disappear … that the rising tide of [the socialist] revolution would increase and that the wide horizons would open for man for … action’. This, the author informed his readers, was what [Abu Yusuf Ya’qub] 182

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al-Kindi expressed in his rational philosophy, and this was what the Arabs needed today.10 In 1974 a Shi‘a-born Marxist historian of the Islamic Middle Ages, Husayn Qasim al-‘Aziz, published in the Ba‘thi intellectual flagship a theoretical article in the same magazine discussing how Islamic history ought to be studied. He criticised medieval Islamic historians for failing to understand the ‘dialectical connection between the development of social forces and change of social production relations’.11 In other words, historians living in the medieval Islamic era were seriously deficient in the sense that they did not understand the (Marxist) principle of ‘natural historical determinism that derives from the natural laws which move the events of history’. They explained history in ‘metaphysical and mythological (read: religious) reasons’. In other words: they were totally unaware of the infallibility of Karl Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism, as any decent historian could have told them. Instead they explained historical developments and events in terms of God’s will. Worse still, they were docile servants of an oppressive regime and even endowed it with a religious hallow. All that those historian wrote, the Marxist intellectual went on, was designed to support the ruler’s ‘divine right to rule, [him] being the shadow of God on earth as claimed to be [the Abbasid Caliph] Abu Jafar al-Mansur’.12 Implying support for atheism, the same historian also dared launch a frontal attack against the greatest Islamic Medieval theologian and mystic, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 ad ). As al-‘Aziz saw it, in his Tahafut al-Falasafa (The Defeat of Philosophy) al-Ghazali ‘helped the transcendental metaphysical (al-mithaliyya al-ghaybiyya, namely: religion) to spread’, and this way he helped ‘freeze thinking’. Modern European thinking introduced new scientific trends that contemporary Arab thinkers adopted. The modern Arab thinkers understood that the attachment to al-Salaf (the teachings of the founding fathers of Islam) was the cause for Arab retardation. In the twentieth century Arab intellectuals adopted ‘progressive ideas’, mainly (Marxist) ‘dialectical materialism’.13 The Ba‘thi historian Muhammad Mubarak argued that the medieval era was essentially an agricultural one in which people depended completely on nature. This created a sense of powerlessness and total dependence (al-ajaz wal-ittikaliyya) on God in the psychology of the individual and the collective. This period was ‘controlled by faith and belief ’ (aqida wa-iman). 183

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It served the ruling classes to control people. When the Prophet brought Islam, Mubarak argued, he actually released the previous religion from its frozen state and was an active force for development. But later (following the rule of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs?) religion ‘froze’ and rather than legitimate and limited interpretation (tafsir) of the scripture, the ruling classes turned to far-reaching and allegoric interpretation (ta’wil). This way the ruling classes twisted the original texts to serve their rule and to control people.14 It seems that Mubarak endeavoured to protect his flank by clarifying that he was not against religion as such, let alone the spirit of Islam in the Prophet’s days. Yet it is sufficiently clear that he believed that religion is suitable only for a primitive agricultural society and that in modern society religion is a thing of the past. Atheism was not the domain of historians alone. In an anthropological research studying contemporary Iraqi society and published as late as 1980 Abd Ali Salman, a Shi‘a Ba‘thi lecturer, pointed out that modern, scientific, atheistic philosophy had already percolated as far down as the Iraqi village. As he described it, in al-Sharsh, a village he studied south of al-Qurna on the Tigris, the struggle was no longer between the competing tribal groups as had been the case in previous eras. Rather it was: A struggle between the old, which is based on religion and tribal tradition (al-urf) and the new, based on liberation from the shackles of religion and traditional customs, and on finding a social mechanism for life that will be more flexible.15

Finally, art, too, was recruited to demonstrate disdain for the Sharia. This was far more risky than highbrow intellectual articles because it was for all to see, and yet the regime did not recoil from it. In 1972 Baghdad’s municipality hired the great sculptor Ismail Fattah Turk to create a larger-than-life bronze monument of the medieval poet Abu Nuwas. Aptly, it was perched on top of a high marble pedestal on Abu Nuwas Street, overlooking the Tigris. Abu Nuwas was the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid’s court poet, whose poetry contains a heavy dose of remarkable wine poems and even hints of love for boys. The poet is sitting on a cushioned bench, holding in his hand a wine cup the size of a bucket.16 No wonder that the enemies of the Ba‘th, when mocking the party, invented for it an oath of allegiance: ‘I swear in the Ba‘th as God who has no co-partner and in Arabism as the 184

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New Testament and Qur’an’ (‘Uqsimu bil-Ba‘th ilahan la sharika lahu wa bil-uruba ingilan wa quranan’).17

‘Ba‘thising’ Medieval Islam Alongside bold rejections of Islam as a way of life in the modern age, even rejection of God, one could also find a complementary intellectual trend that sought to prove that, when understood properly, Islamic civilisation and even Islam as a religion in its very early phase was very close to the contemporary ideals of the Ba‘th Party. Ba‘thi and even Marxist intellectuals defended Islam this way, but what appears to be a staunch defence of Islam was, in fact, defence of the Ba‘th Party against accusations of hostility to Islam and even what looks like soft atheism. At its heart, regime intellectuals insisted, the original Islam of the Prophet was a kind of progressive Arab nationalism. It was: tolerant and open-minded; open to modernity and influences from the outside world; science-friendly; rational; far from ‘superstitions’, ‘metaphysics’ and mysticism; egalitarian; pregnant with revolutionary spirit and socialist experiments; protective of women’s rights; and definitely suitable for the modern age. Sometimes Ba‘thi intellectuals seem even to imply that early Islam was secular. When it comes to the Islamic civilisation of the eighth to twelfth centuries some of those claims were indeed correct, especially the great contribution to science, philosophy and art, but in no way all claims. This looked like a split personality syndrome – and it certainly was that. After all, defining Islam explicitly as unsuitable for organising modern life was the conviction of the hard core of party activists and it appealed to the secular young generations between the 1940s and at least the 1980s. There seem to be three inter-related reasons for the sympathetic historiography of early Islam. One was the party’s need to legitimise itself in the eyes of the more religious educated public. There was a need to demonstrate that the ideals of the Ba‘th Party were authentically Arab and, as such, also those of the Prophet. Another was to assure party members that they emerged from a great Arab-Islamic civilisation. In order to be able to portray the Islam of all these as a deviation from the original and true Islam, the Ba‘th had to present its own, ‘correct’ interpretation. It was therefore necessary to show that the early Islamic civilisation was a mirror-image of the contemporary Ba‘th Party and its 185

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declared values. In other words, to fight the fundamentalists it was necessary to Ba‘thise early Islam. Nonetheless, the party did have a split personality regarding Islam, as did the Christian Michel Aflaq when he founded the party in the 1940s.18 The great and proven contribution of the Islamic civilisation to the development of scientific thought was the main avenue through which some of the regime’s intellectuals sought to fight the Islamic fundamentalists and to legitimise their own rationalist world view. Sometimes, though, they carried it too far. As the Ba‘thi historians saw it, unlike the fundamentalists ‘superstitious’ and ‘mystical’ world and their blind reliance on God (al-tawakkul), true Islam in its infancy was scientific. Thus, for example, one Ba‘thi, Abd Allah Ahmad Muhammad, endeavoured to prove that it was a medieval Muslim scientist who was the first aviator in history.19 Indeed, in the 1980s Saddam ordered the construction of a large monument of the ‘first aviator’, ‘Abbas bin Farnas, on the road between Baghdad and the international airport. In a similar fashion, another intellectual, Abd al-Razzaq al-Manna, praised the Arab Islamic Tradition (al-hadith) as the first case of ‘scientific history writing’ to the extent that the writing of history was considered ‘an Arab science’.20 The contribution of Islamic civilisation to the sciences and to the ‘scientific research system’ is described through the account of Ibn Tufayl [Abu Bakr Muhammad, known in the West as Abubacer] of the experiments performed by Hayy bin Yaqzan, a character in a philosophical allegory, whom the author believes preceded Copernicus, Galileo and others.21 Another Ba‘thi writer, Sabih Sadiq, argued that while European civilisation has ascribed the discovery of gravity to Newton, it was, in fact, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and others in the ArabIslamic civilisation who referred to it for the first time. As Sadiq would have it, before Copernicus there were Arab scientists like al-Idrisi and alMasudi, who declared that the earth is round and is circling the sun. Even Darwinism was preceded by thinkers like al-Jahiz, al-Mas’udi Ikha al-Safa, Ibn Tufayl and others.22 The Marxist Faysal al-Samir is probably the most important historian to develop this kind of historiography. From his writings it is easy to reach the conclusion that in early Islam God was superfluous. By portraying an idyllic picture of the past al-Samir hoped to inspire the Arabs to strive for a similar future: they were rational and scientific in the past, they can be 186

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again. As Samir would have it, all that the Arabs needed to do was a ‘mere return to … the sources of our ancient culture’. This would ‘liberate the Arab mind from all the superstitions [read: religion], so that it can reach the scientific stage’, as indeed happened in modern Europe.23 Al-Samir argued that in its hey-day, Islam was rational and open and inquisitive, and that it believed in man’s freedom of choice. However, the later centuries brought about intellectual paralysis, largely as a result of non-Arab rule in the Arab lands (beginning in the tenth century). Under this foreign (Seljuk, Turkish, Persian, Mongol) rule ‘the most marvellous traditions of innovation and intellectual and social freedom in the history of Arab-Islamic civilisation were eliminated’. During those centuries of foreign rule, he continued: superstition overcame reason, and divine predestined decree of fate (al-jabar) and the reliance on God (al-tawakkul) defeated the free reasoning based on the Qur’an and the Sunna (alijtihad) and free will. The supernatural (al-ghaybiyya) took the place of scientific experimental thought.24

Indeed, al-Samir pointed out that those were the Arabs who first established the principle of scientific experimentation and showed the way to European scientists. The work of the medieval Arab mathematician alBayruni, for example, served as a basis for Newton’s calculations, and other Muslim scientists led the way six centuries before Francis Bacon. Women’s status, too, was far higher in those days. Dr al-Samir pointed out (correctly) that the state made efforts to prevent price rises. However, it proved difficult for the Marxist historian to rest on solid historical ground for very long. Next he pointed out that in the early days of the Islamic civilisation it supported voluntary organisations like the asnaf (a medieval Islamic form of artisans’ guilds) that represented ‘city workers and peasants’ in their struggle against their exploiters.25 (In fact, the asnaf protected their members’ monopoly over certain professions). This duality – apparent religiosity but actual struggle against religious influence – continued into the 1980s. On the one hand, in response to the 1979 victory of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran and the Iran–Iraq War, the party’s Ninth Regional Congress, convened in June 1982, severely criticised Ba‘th Party members for displaying too much Islamic religiosity.26 On the other, intellectual magazines continued to argue that Islam in its 187

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original, progressive form is suitable for modern-day society because it is fully rational and free from the ‘supernatural’.

Defending Early Islam and the Abbasid Golden Age Since the late 1970s the whole approach to medieval history has changed radically. Regime-sponsored historians have become adamant about glorifying the Arab-Islamic golden age, mainly the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries ad. Judging by the texts this change was introduced to lift Arab morale and make the Arabs proud of their past. Another motivation was, as pointed out above, to help legitimise Ba‘th rule in the face of numerous Shi‘a mass protests. The Ba‘th regime realised that it was no longer a ‘revolution’ but, rather, a status-quo power struggle. Any hint of support for a quasi-Shi‘a revolt against the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate could be seen as implying support for a revolt against the Sunni-hegemonic Ba‘th regime. Last but not least, the regime came incrementally to see itself as the latter-day incarnation of the medieval Baghdad-based glory that was the Abbasids. Indeed, glorifying the Abbasids was very popular in modern Iraq among the Sunni historians. Since the first days of the Hashemite monarchy (1921–58) Iraqi textbooks were written in this spirit, equating the Hashemite royal family with the Abbasids and promising a new golden age.27 The Shi‘a had a very different take on the Abbasids: they were considered usurpers who robbed the Imams of the Shi‘a of their birth- and Godordained right to the caliphate. They are also believed to have murdered a number of these Imams. Caliph Harun al-Rashid, for example (d. 809 ad ), who more than anyone else embodies the golden age in Iraqi Sunni eyes, imprisoned the seventh Imam Musa al-Kazim (d. 799 ad ) and is believed to have poisoned him.

Enter Anti-Shi‘a and Anti-Persian Historiography: The Babikiyya-Kharamiyya The most conspicuous case of a regime-inspired attempt to protect the early Muslim Arabs and after them the Abbasids against Marxist historians and to de-legitimise the Shi‘a was a set of fascinating academic battles between 188

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the gifted establishment Sunni historian Dr Faruq ‘Umar Fawzi (henceforth: ‘Umar) and various detractors of the Arab-Islamic conquests and the Abbasid. One example is the intellectual battle between ‘Umar and the Shi‘a-born Marxist historian Husayn Qasim al-‘Aziz. The latter, being Iraq’s leading Marxist historian, aroused ‘Umar’s wrath because he presented both the Arab early conquests and the Abbasid caliphate in quite an ugly light. Al-‘Aziz was an Iraqi communist who achieved his PhD in Moscow at the Institute for Eastern Languages, under Professor Bonyatov. In his critique of al-‘Aziz, ‘Umar complained bitterly that the Marxist’s account was damaging to Arab self-view: ‘Does the Arab reader find in the … [Marxist’s] book what strengthens his pride in his positive values? The … book is hard on our Arab history.’28 More specifically, ‘Umar expressed deep disappointment at the way the Marxist al-‘Aziz describes the Arab territorial expansion in the seventh century ad. While al-‘Aziz sees the early Islamic expansion into Iraq, Syria and Egypt as ‘an act of occupation’ (ihtilal), designed to ‘acquire the wealth of the occupied countries’, ‘Umar sees in it nothing but ‘an act of liberation of lands in which Arab tribes had been dwelling and which the Sassanid [Persians] and the Byzantines had robbed’.29 The task of the Ba‘thi-recruited historians in the late 1970s was to prove the false nature of any claim that medieval anti-Umayyad and antiAbbasid movements were fighting for social justice. To delegitimise such revolts they had to prove that the revolutionaries were anti-Arab or dangerously extreme, cruel or cynical, corrupt sexually or financially, or all of the above. A particularly conspicuous example of the sparring between an establishment historian and an Iraqi Marxist historian over a Shi‘ainfluenced movement is the battle over the true nature of the anti-Abbasid Babikiyya-Kharamiyya revolt in Azerbeijan, which lasted some 20  years and was suppressed in 838 ad. In 1974 Husayn Qasim al-‘Aziz published a book on the Babikiyya-Kharamiyya that was an adaptation of his PhD dissertation.30 At first the book was received well but in 1974–7 a sea change in politics took place. Having put down a few Shi‘a mass-protests in the mid- and late 1970s, the Ba‘th regime recoiled from any attempt to justify any medieval Shi‘a-inspired revolt against the Sunni caliphate. In addition, the removal in 1973 of the left wing of the Ba‘th leadership led by ‘Abd alKhaliq al-Samarra’i may have replaced a pro-revolution with a pro-statusquo atmosphere. 189

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In January 1977 ‘Umar launched scathing attacks against al-‘Aziz and his book.31 In June ‘Umar escalated his attack, this time against an article al-‘Aziz had published in the still-legal Communist monthly al-Thaqafa al-Jadida. This time he also attacked Shi‘a eschatology. The reason for the escalation was apparently that in February 1977 Iraq saw the most violent Shi‘a anti-Ba‘th demonstrations ever. In both his articles ‘Umar demonstrated his anger because al-‘Aziz (and his communist colleagues) presented the Babikiyya-Kharamiyya as if it ‘led for over twenty years a heroic and arduous liberating struggle against the ruling classes and the [Abbasid] caliphate’.32 Al-‘Aziz and his Marxist friends also claimed that the movement had ‘well-defined revolutionary social programs’. The Babikiyya-Kharamiyya, according to those Marxists, fought against ‘oppression and exploitation’ by disobeying the feudalists and the government and by declining to pay taxes. ‘Umar was out to destroy their thesis. He quoted medieval historians like al-Baghdadi, al-Maqdisi, Ibn al-Jawzi, Shaharistani, al-Bayruni, al-Tabari and Ibn al-Athir, and lamented the fact that al-‘Aziz and his Soviet mentor accused them of partiality.33 ‘Umar pointed out (correctly) that Babik, the movement’s leader, did not fight for the liberation of his ‘occupied homeland’ of Azerbaijan, as claimed by his Marxist nemesis. The revolution was not that of the Azerbaijani ‘people’ but, rather, it was a revolt of a hodgepodge of elements including Arabs and it went far beyond the borders of Azerbaijan. Furthermore, while the Marxist al-‘Aziz regarded the Babikiyya-Kharamiyya as ‘a peasant uprising against tyranny and oppression … one of the greatest of the popular uprisings of peasants’, Faruq ‘Umar pointed out, correctly again, that the feudalists actually joined the revolt and that it was also supported by the Byzantine emperor, not exactly a socialist revolutionary historical figure. Thus, ‘Umar pointed out, the definition by al-‘Aziz of the revolt as ‘class struggle’ was completely false.34 In June, following the Shi‘a anti-Ba‘th demonstrations, ‘Umar went one step further when he accused the medieval anti-Abbasid movement of ‘inclination towards sexual promiscuity (al-Ibahiyya)’. Some medieval historians report that members of the movement shared their women, a questionable claim ‘Umar seems to accept at face value. Could this be an allusion to the Shi‘a legalisation of the mut’ah ‘Umar also argued that the Babikiyya-Kharamiyya was an extremely violent movement that spilled 190

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much blood. The leader, Babik al-Kharami, is reported by medieval historians to have ‘tortured people and set [settlements] on fire’.35 Far more explicitly and brazenly, in his June article ‘Umar insisted that the criminal Babikiyya movement saw in their leaders prophets, and believed in their Return (al-raj’ah) after they died. They ‘predicted the arrival of the Savior (al-Munqidh) in the personality of a previous leader or religious reformer’. Here the Sunni historian Faruq ‘Umar stabbed his knife deeply into the Shi‘a collective body and turned it without mercy. This belief in the ‘Savior Hero’ and his Return, he argued, was adopted by other movements like the one led by ‘the ‘Alawi (read:  early Shi‘a) revolutionary, Muhammad [Ibn Abd Allah, Dhu] al-Nafs al-Zakiyya’. It must be borne in mind that Dhu alNafs al-Zakiyya, who led a Shi‘a revolt against the Abbasids in Hijaz in 762 ad, is a much-loved and admired figure in Shi‘a tradition. ‘Umar reminded his readers that Dhu al-Nafs al-Zakiyya claimed that he was ‘the Expected Mahdi (al-Mahdi al-Muntazar)’.36 As far as is known, though, Dhu alNafs al-Zakiyya, a descendant of Imam al-Hasan (the second Shi‘a Imam) declared himself the legitimate Imam of his time rather than the Expected Imam. Only after his death did some of his followers, the Muhammadiyya, believe that he vanished into occultation, from which he would emerge one day to fill the earth with justice.37 Be that as it may, Faruq ‘Umar implied that the Shi‘a belief in the Expected Imam Mahdi is a Persian Zoroastrian idolatry.

Al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi A few months later the prolific ‘Umar was out to demolish yet another Shi‘a historical hero and he again trashed the eschatological concept of the Return of the Imam Mahdi.38 He portrayed al-Mukhtar [bin Abu Ubayd] al-Thaqafi, who fought against the Umayyad rule in Iraq (685–7 ad ) in the name of the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-Bayt), as a cynical politician and religious hypocrite who betrayed Islam. As ‘Umar saw it, al-Mukhtar exploited the resentment of the Mawali (the Persian newcomers to Islam who were required to become clients of an Arab tribe) but, at any moment, was ready to shift to the Arab establishment, had the latter been ready to support his revolt. ‘Umar presented al-Mukhtar as cynical in religious terms too, as he adopted different religious slogans according to political expediency and 191

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even resorted to religious trickery. Indeed, he even returned to unspecified Jahili (pre-Islamic heathen) rites. ‘Umar pointed out (correctly) that at the same time that al-Mukhtar had risen in revolt, the moderate Shi‘as – such as Muhammad bin al-Hanafiyah (637–700, half-brother of al-Hasan and al-Husayn, the second and third Shi‘a Imams), in whose name al-Mukhtar fought – opposed him. ‘Umar admitted that in later years the Shi‘a considered him a great leader because he killed Imam Husayn’s murderers, and because he claimed to have represented the Prophet’s family. However, as ‘Umar saw it: al-Mukhtar’s doctrine (‘aqida) went beyond the moderate Shi‘ah to extremism … He was no longer a revolutionary for the sake of the pro-Ali [Shi‘a] cause and avenging the Prophet’s family, but, rather, he became a leader of a religious group that came to be known as al-Mukhtariyya, or al-Kaysaniyya, or Khashabiyya.39

As a result, even some of the Shi‘a of his time saw him as ‘a dajjal (the Islamic equivalent of anti-Christ or a ‘trickster’) and charlatan (kadhdhab)’. ‘Umar pointed out that even the great Western historian Wellhausen mistakenly regarded him as an ardent pro-Ali Shi‘a, devoted to bringing justice to the Mawali, but ‘Umar believed that in fact Mukhtar was a cynical politician who would do anything ‘to achieve power and influence’.40 In other words, to ‘Umar one of the most admired figures of early Shi‘a Islam was nothing more than a self-serving megalomaniac rascal.

Conclusion The sophisticated duels of the second half of the 1970s between the two camps  – the establishment historians versus what may be termed as Marxist-inclined ‘New Historians’  – seems to have become a thrilling pastime for secular Iraqi intellectuals. Since he became president in 1979, and more so since he launched his offensive into Iran in 1980, Saddam prevented subversive historiography. In this way he rendered the debate more-or-less unnecessary. Medieval historiography became overwhelmingly anti-Persian, including the presentation of Arab Shi‘ism as legitimate while Iranian/Persian Shi‘ism was presented as deviant, derived from 192

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Zoroastrianism. Historiography of the ancient Mesopotamian era, too, became anti-Persian. Atheism disappeared altogether from the intellectual magazines.41 After that life for avid history students in Iraq became quite boring. In the mid-1980s, as a result of a cynical, pragmatic calculation the state-sponsored history was directly affected by the Ba‘th regime’s slow U-turn towards Islam. A decade later it had completed the turn. The shift in the historiography of medieval Islam was the harbinger of this dramatic U-turn. The regime in Iraq used history and historical writing as tools to manipulate state–society relations after 1968. During the period of early Ba‘th rule, historians utilised Marxist and secularist thought to legitimise Ba‘thi rule and assert the modern nature of the regime in Baghdad. In essence, Ba‘thi intellectuals sought to use historical writing as a means of asserting authority over the Iraqi population. Official state-sponsored history presented an atheist regime set to bring a change to Iraqi society through political and intellectual progress. Once the regime became politically and socially entrenched in Iraqi society, historical writing had to change and ensure that it progressed with the pressing of political issues of the time. In the context of Shi‘a uprisings against the Ba‘thist state, anti-Persian and even anti-Shi‘a history was used by the state in order to present the evil nature of Shi‘ism and the danger it posed to the Iraqi society.

Notes 1. An early discussion of this subject may be found in my book Saddam Husayn and Islam 1968–2003: Ba‘thi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 70–3, 133–8. This chapter adds data and provides more analysis. 2. A number of studies of Iraq’s history under the Ba‘th regime have now been published. The common denominator of these studies is that they are based, who’ly or in large part, on a new kind of source material: two rich US-based archives, containing internal Iraqi-Ba‘thi documents. While due to the nature of the source material these studies do not dedicate special attention to historiography of medieval Islam under the Ba‘th, they are very valuable as they shed more light on the last 20 to 25 years of the Ba‘th regime and, as part of that process, highlight the political and social issues that had already emerged in the first 12 years of Ba‘thi rule covered in this article. See, in chronological order, Kevin M. Woods, The Mother of all Battles: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

Plan for the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008); Kevin M. Woods, Williamson Murray, Thomas Holaday and Mounir Elkhamri, Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military Perspective of the Iran-Iraq War (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2009); Pesach Malovany, The Wars of Modern Babylon (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv : Ma’arachot, Israel’s Ministry of Defense Press, 2009; in English, 2016); Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki and Mark E. Stout, The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ariel I. Ahram, Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Abbas Kadhim, ‘The Hawza under siege: a study in the Ba‘th Party archive’, Occasional Paper 1, Boston University Institute for Iraqi Studies, June 2013; Dina R. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, The IranIraq War: A Military and Strategic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Aaron M. Faust, The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015). See, for example, an article attacking the Shi‘a communist Husayn Qasin al‘Aziz, who had published his article in Al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, one of the two legal communist magazines, Faruq ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘Al-Haraka al-Kharamiyya fi al ‘asr al-’abbasi bayna al-dughmatiya wal-mawdhu’iyya’ [The Kharamiyya Movement in the Abbasid era between dogmatism and objectivity], Afaq ‘Arabiyya 10 (June 1977), pp. 94–9. In this article I am defining as ‘Marxist-inclined’ intellectuals who use Marxist terminology and principles as leading themes. Some of them were Ba‘th Party members, others were regime-sponsored ‘independents’. Some, who published abroad, were close to the Iraqi Communist Party. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, Masirat al-Thawra fi Khutab wa-Tasrihat al-Ra’is (Baghdad, 1971), pp. 57–9. Saddam Husayn, ‘A view of religion and heritage’, On History, Heritage and Religion (Baghdad:  Translation and Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981), pp. 24–9; Hasan Tawalba (ed.), Muqtatafat min ahadith Saddam Husayn (Beirut: Dar al-Tali`a, 1979), pp. 175–86. An identical approach is expressed in early 1980 by Al-Thawra al-’Arabiyya, the internal party organ, disseminated to members only, when it attacked Khomeini’s Islam. See ‘Al-’Ilmaniyya wa Jawhar al-Mawqif al-Ba‘thi Min al-Din’, in the issue of July 1980, pp. 13–18. See, for example, Amatzia Baram, ‘Qawmiyya and Wataniyya in Ba‘thi Iraq: The search for a new balance’, Middle Eastern Studies 19/2 (1983), pp. 188–200; Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba‘thist Iraq, 1968–1989 (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 30, 64, 175.

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BA‘THI IRAQ IN THE 1970S 8. Husayn, ‘A view of religion and heritage’, pp. 24, 27–8. 9. Mubarak, ‘Harakat al-Zanj wa ba’d mu’tiyat ‘Asrina al-Idiyulujiyya’, pp. 51–4. 10. Muhammad Mubarak, ‘Harakat al-Zanj wa ba’d mu’tiyat ‘Asrina al-Idiyulujiyya’, al-Muthaqqaf al-’Arabi (September–October 1970). Al-Kindi (d. 866 ad ) was called ‘The Arabs’ Philosopher’: he translated Greek philosophy into Arabic, studied logic and was a mathematician, astronomer and musician. 11. Husayn Qasim al-‘Aziz, ‘al-Asas al-Maddi li tatawwur minaj al-Bahth alta’rikhi’, al-Muthaqqaf al-’Arabi 6/1 (January 1974), pp. 87–92. 12. Al-‘Aziz, ‘al-Asas al-Maddi li tatawwur minaj al-Bahth al-ta’rikhi’, pp. 87–92. 13. Mubarak, ‘Harakat al-Zanj wa ba’d mu’tiyat ‘Asrina al-Idiyulujiyya’, pp. 90–2. 14. Ibid., pp. 45–54. 15. Abd Ali Salman, al-Mujtama al-Rifi fi al-Iraq (Baghdad:  Wizarat al-Thaqafa wal-Ilam, Dar al-Rashid lil-Nashr, 1980), p. 18. 16. Baram, Culture, History and Ideology, plate 13. 17. Interviews with Iraqi Shi‘a anti-Ba‘thi activists, 1990–2003. 18. Michel Aflaq, Fi Sabil al-Ba‘th (Beirut, Dar al-Tali’ah, 1974), pp. 131–2, 164–7. 19. Abd Allah Ahmad Muhammad, ‘Abbas bin farnas al-raid al-awwal lil-tayran’, Afaq ‘Arabiyya 3/1 (September 1977), pp. 19–21. 20. Abd al-Razzaq al-Manna, ‘al-Minhajiyya al-’ilmiyya fi dirasat al-ta’rikh’, Afaq Arabiyya 1/12 (1969), pp. 34–5. 21. S. Salih, ‘al-Tariqa al-ilmiyyainda ibn tufayl’, Afaq Arabiyya 1/7 (March 1976), pp. 110–11. 22. Sabih Sadiq, ‘Ma ibtadaahu al-lama al-Arab wa nusiba ila al-lama al-urbiyin’, Afaq Arabiyya 1/10 (June 1976), pp. 33–4. 23. Faysal al-Samir, ‘Hal nahnu ahl li nahdha jadida’, al-Muthaqqaf al-Arabi 5/1 (September 1973), pp. 53–63. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. See also, about the accumulation of knowledge in Arab-Islamic civilisation, Professor Naji Ma’ruf, ‘Athar buyut al-hikma fi al-hadhara al’Arabiyya’ [The Influence of the Houses of Knowledge in Arab Civilisation], Al-Aqlam 6/8 (May 1970), pp. 3–10. And on the influence of Ibn Rushd on European thinking, see Salim Taha al-Tikriti, ‘Ibn rushd wa al-tafkir alurubi’ [Ibn Rushd and European Thinking], Al-Aqlam 6/8 (May 1970), pp. 147–53. 26. Arab Ba‘th Socialist Party Iraq, ‘The Central Report of the Ninth Regional Congress June 1982’, Baghdad, January 1983 trans. published by Sartec, Lausanne, Switzerland, pp. 279–83. 27. See Sami Shawkat, Hadhihi Ahdafuna:  Man Aman Biha Fahwa Minna (Baghdad: Wazarat al-Macarif, 1939). 28. Faruq ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘al-Babikiyya wa Fikr al-Qaran al-’Ishrin’, Afaq ‘Arabiyya 5/2 (January 1977), pp. 77–89, 88.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 29. Ibid., p. 86. ‘Umar is relating to a new book written by al-‘Aziz, al-Babikiyya, Intifadat al-Sha’b al-Adhirbijani dhidd al-Khilafa al-’Abbasiyya [The Babikiyya [Kharamiyya]-the Intifadha of the the Azerbeijani People against the Abbasid Caliphate] (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Nahdha, Beirut Dar al-Farabi, 1974). The book was an adaptation of a PhD dissertation prepared in Moscow under Professor Bonyatov at the Institute for Eastern Languages. 30. Ibid. 31. ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘al-Babikiyya wa Fikr al-Qaran al-’Ishrin’. 32. ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘Al-Haraka al-Kharamiyya’. 33. ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘al-Babikiyya wa Fikr al-Qaran al-’Ishrin’, p.  81. In this ‘Umar exposed his political bias: in his own London University PhD he had occasionally doubted the impartiality of medieval Muslim historians. 34. ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘al-Babikiyya wa Fikr al-Qaran al-’Ishrin’. 35. ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘Al-Haraka al-Kharamiyya’, mainly p. 95. 36. Ibid. 37. See Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi‘a Islam: The History and Doctrine of Twelver Shi‘ism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 50. 38. Faruq ‘Umar Fawzi, ‘Harakat al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi …’ [The Movement of Mukhtar al-Thaqafi …], Afaq ‘Arabiyya 1/3 (September 1977), pp. 76–82. 39. Ibid., p. 81. 40. Ibid. 41. In 1986, in a closed-doors meeting of the pan-Arab Leadership of the party, Saddam explained that accusations of atheism were causing considerable damage to the party. See the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) archive at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, SH-SHTP-A-001-167, 24 July 1986.

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9 Ba‘thist Penetration of Shi‘a Religious Institutions Samuel Helfont

This chapter discusses the Ba‘thist regime’s attempt to systematically penetrate Shi‘a religious institutions during the presidency of Saddam Husayn (1979–2003). It argues that the regime was more successful in doing so than previous scholarly literature on Iraq has acknowledged. Typical of self-described revolutionary regimes in the post-colonial Middle East, the Ba‘thist rulers of Iraq came to power through a coup d’état and quickly established control over the security services and the shell of the Iraqi state. However, powerful social institutions existed in Iraq that proved much more difficult to manage.1 The Ba‘thist regime’s relationship with the Shi‘a religious institutions concentrated in southern Iraq exemplified this complexity. The internal Iraqi state and Ba‘th Party records2 shed new light on the methods that Saddam’s regime employed in its attempt to control them. These records convey a narrative about state control of Shi‘a institutions – and ultimately state–society relations in Iraq – that differs significantly from most scholarly depictions. Analysts of 1990s Iraq, in particular, have tended to liken this period to other authoritarian states in which civil society emerged.3 Accordingly, scholars also highlight the ‘counter-hegemonic’ forces,4 the opening of ‘autonomous social spaces’5 and the ‘already crumbling tyranny of Saddam Hussein’.6 Yet, in contradiction to the idea of a state that was losing control, the Iraqi records offer a narrative of coercion, 197

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co-optation and ultimately control of Shi‘a institutions in Iraq. Following a quick overview of the Ba‘thist regime’s strategies for controlling Shi‘a institutions in Iraq, this chapter will proceed chronologically from the beginning of Saddam’s presidency in 1979, through the Iran–Iraq War, and then the Gulf War and the 1990s. It will discuss the regime’s increasing penetration of Shi‘a institutions in Iraq in each period as well as the consequences for the Shi‘a religious landscape.

Ba‘thist Strategies for Controlling Shi‘a Religious Institutions Saddam’s presidency was typified by violent attempts to establish his rule over uncontrolled sectors of Iraqi society. However, coercion and violence were not his regime’s first resort. Iraq’s Ba‘thist regime possessed a wellarticulated strategy of what it termed ‘Ba‘thification’ (tab’ith), in which it attempted to penetrate all aspects of society and to transform them from independent or civil actors into instruments of Ba‘thist power.7 By design, this policy concealed the regime’s role in closely managing Iraqi society as the regime depicted these Ba‘thised institutions and social sectors as independent representatives of the Iraqi people, who freely chose to support the regime. This strategy stemmed from the Ba‘thists’ desire for and glorification of the idea of popular revolution. The regime attempted to apply this strategy across all sectors of Iraqi society. Thus Sunni religious leaders faced similar intrusive policies. However, the success of the strategy was uneven. Some sectors of society and social institutions reacted differently to the intrusion of state power. Shi‘a religious institutions proved especially difficult in that respect, particularly as they had historically enjoyed independence from the state and they fiercely guarded their autonomy. As such, the historiography of state–society relations in this period has tended to emphasise the independence of Iraqi religious, especially Shi‘a, institutions.8 This historiography particularly highlights the receding influence of the Ba‘thist regime – and the state it controlled – after the disastrous 1991 Gulf War and the crippling sanctions that followed. The recently released archives of the former regime challenge this narrative. Saddam’s regime developed and implemented sophisticated plans to recruit Shi‘a religious leaders and to place its own Ba‘thist agents within 198

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the Shi‘a seminaries. The regime also used bureaucratic mechanisms, such as student visas, to control non-Iraqis studying in the Shi‘a seminaries and to coerce them into acting in accordance with the Ba‘thists’ interests. Most of the senior Shi‘a scholars initially resisted Ba‘thist interference. However, after years of subtle manipulation and extreme violence, many of them began to cooperate with the regime, and were integrated into state institutions controlled by the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs. The Ba‘thists often worked with these clergy to conceal the extent of their ties to the regime and the state. The resulting relationship between the Shi‘a religious institutions and the state was enigmatic by design.

Repression and Co-Optation When Saddam assumed the Iraqi presidency in 1979, the Ba‘thists faced growing resistance from Shi‘as in southern Iraq. Shi‘a demonstrations against the Ba‘thist regime date from the mid-1970s and thus began before Saddam’s presidency.9 However, when Saddam became president he afforded them renewed attention. He worked quickly to consolidate his hold on power in order to neutralise potential dissent. Unauthorised gatherings of large numbers of people were inherently dangerous to an authoritarian regime. The fact that Shi‘a gatherings had already exploded into anti-regime demonstrations in the past made them even more troublesome. This danger was exacerbated by the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980. Though the initial unrest in the mid-1970s had several causes  – not all of them sectarian or religious in nature – the Ba‘thists feared that the Iranians intended to undermine their regime by ‘employing religious celebrations’ to, among other things, spark sectarianism, spread anti-regime and pro-Persian rumours, sabotage Iraq’s military, political and economic sectors, and ‘carry out assassinations of Ba‘th Party officials and people affiliated with the security services’.10 Thus, whatever their cause, Saddam feared that Shi‘a unrest, if not properly managed, could become a tangible threat to his rule.11 Saddam’s regime had no reservations about responding to potential threats with brutality. It made membership in the Shi‘a Islamist Dawa Party a capital offence, and in a well-documented campaign12 it executed 199

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hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Dawa members, including the 1980 arrest and execution of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda. The regime deported thousands of Shi‘as, whom it claimed were Iranian nationals, and executed numerous members of the prominent al-Hakim family, which had produced several Shi‘a religious leaders. Six members of the al-Hakim family were executed and 100 were detained in 1983. Ten more were killed in 1985, and later in the decade the regime assassinated Mahdi al-Hakim (a grandson of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, d. 1970), while he was on a trip to Sudan.13 Nevertheless, it appears the regime understood that violence alone could not achieve its goals. The Ba‘thists viewed themselves as populists (sha’bi). Thus, they wanted not only to neutralise potential threats but also to gain the active support of the Iraqi masses – including the Shi‘as. Therefore, following Saddam’s rise to the presidency, the regime began to develop larger, more systematic plans for co-opting Shi‘a institutions – most notably the important Shi‘a seminaries known as the hawza.14 The regime was, to put it mildly, suspicious of the hawza’s independence and often accused it of being controlled by Iran. One regime report argued that the ‘weakness of the state’ prior to the Ba‘thist coming to power in the 1960s permitted the hawza to be manipulated by colonialism, international oil companies and Iran, among other nefarious forces.15 Moreover, regime officials believed that because of this manipulation and control by outside forces, the hawza had spawned the Dawa Party and other political organisations that mislead Iraqis by disguising themselves ‘under the cover of religion’.16 To address this situation, in the early and mid-1980s Saddam ordered at least two high level committees (and possibly more) to investigate the hawza. Ba‘thist reports about these meetings exist in several different forms with different dates, so the exact time that they occurred is difficult to pin down. However, they are most likely to have taken place in 1984 and 1985. The committees were tasked with determining an appropriate course of action for the regime and were headed by Saddam’s closest and most loyal associates. One was chaired by Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid (also known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing the Kurds), and the other by Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. The directors of both of Iraq’s state intelligence services (al-mukhabarat and al-amn al-’amm), as well as the director of the General Police and the Ba‘th Party officials responsible 200

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for Southern Iraq, also sat on the committees. In each case, the committees assembled several times and met with religious leaders throughout the country. They created lengthy recommendations, which were forwarded to and then approved by Saddam.17 These reports then became the basis for the regime’s policy toward the hawza and other Shi‘a religious institutions. The reports reveal that on several occasions the regime had considered eliminating the senior Shi‘a scholar in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khu’i and ‘mov[ing] the hawza from Iraq to Iran’.18 Yet, the committees argued against this, as they feared it would only benefit the Ba‘thists’ adversaries in Iran.19 Instead, they suggested ‘strengthen[ing] the role of the hawza in order to serve the march (of the Ba‘th) and the revolution’.20 In other words, they thought it more prudent to strengthen the regime’s control over the hawza and thus to use it to advance Ba‘thist goals. In doing so, the hawza’s independence from the Iraqi state would be curtailed significantly, a policy that mirrored a general Ba‘thist preference to keep traditional institutions in place in order to co-opt them. By doing so, they could feed off the authority and perceived authenticity of these institutions while employing them for the regime’s purposes. However, gaining control of the hawza was no simple task. The Shi‘a scholars closely guarded its independence and were willing to suffer considerably to maintain it. Since the regime was unwilling to eliminate them, it needed to find other means to bring them under its control. One of the most important policies the regime implemented in that regard was to take charge of the hawza’s finances. On one hand, the regime seized the endowments that the Shi‘a religious leaders had amassed and that they used to maintain their independence from the state.21 On the other hand, the regime decided to begin supporting the hawza financially and thus ‘reduce its dependency’ on foreign funds (especially from Iran). In the regime’s estimation, this would ‘limit the deviant and sinful orientations’ within the hawza and bring it in line with ‘the revolution and the Party’.22 The Ba‘thists also used their control of the state to influence the hawza. For example, foreign students travelling to Iraq to study at the hawza required a state-issued visa. The regime ordered the special security services in its embassies to investigate the political and social background of every potential student and thereby limit who could study in the country. In doing so, the security services developed relationships with and ensured 201

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the cooperation of all potential students. The embassies then forwarded the approved students’ information to the security services in Iraq with the suggestion that, as one report noted, ‘in light of this information, cooperation with these students [while] they are in the country is possible’. Further, the regime only offered them a limited visa, which then required the students to take part in ongoing reviews that solicited their cooperation in order to obtain extensions. That the regime took such procedures seriously is corroborated by the fact that it only permitted specially trained security officers with nothing less than the rank of captain to deal with these students. The regime assessed that these students were vulnerable because ‘for the most part’, they ‘come from circles which need financial support, and therefore [the state] can provide this for them’. Thus the Ba‘thists felt that ‘it is possible to influence [the students] and to supply them with ideas on the Islamic religion and its luminous essence’. In other words, the regime hoped to indoctrinate them with pro-Ba‘thist interpretations of Islam. But, ‘as for the students who deviate from this approach, their residency will be revoked and they will be sent back to their countries’.23 For Iraqi students studying at the hawza, the regime took a different approach. It chose 20–30 specific students and concentrated on giving them a proper ‘party education’ (read: indoctrination) and on making them into ‘good comrades who are acquainted with religious matters’.24 After these students had been co-opted, they were then used to spy on and control the others. When these students graduated, they were put on the payroll of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs and sent to the various provinces to serve as religious leaders. They would then help to spread Ba‘thist interpretations of Islam among the general population and to keep an eye on other Shi‘a scholars who were not working for the regime. A select few of the Iraqi students were also used to manage the foreign students. As one report stated, a small group of Iraqis – ‘3 or 4 of the students from each province accepted in these schools in Najaf and Karbala’ − was ‘chosen meticulously and soundly by the Party and security services’. These students became ‘a means to facilitate’ the activities outlined above for the foreign students.25 The Ba‘thist students did not limit their activities to the classroom. They were also expected to concentrate their efforts in student housing 202

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complexes and other more casual settings. The regime hoped that ‘the final outcome of applying the above’ would be ‘the strengthening of the hawza in Iraq and its future management’.26 As such, state agencies such as the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs as well as the security and intelligence services began to play increasingly important roles in the hawza’s affairs. The regime also insisted on state control of the curriculum in Shi‘a religious schools. Previously, the hawza scholars had determined what would be studied. Because Ba‘thists viewed opposition to their rule as stemming from the Persians’ age-old dislike of Islam’s Arab roots, and from their inability to properly understand Islam’s canonical Arabic sources, they mandated the Arabisation of the curriculum in Shi‘a religious schools. This was intended to neutralise Persian influences and thus the Islamist opposition, which the regime treated as Iranian clients. Along those lines, the committee reports discussed above demanded that that all religious students begin their studies with an emphasis on Arabic.27 The regime also insisted that a year of Arabic be added to the curriculum for all non-Arab students and that foreign students who knew Arabic be preferred over those who did not.28 A  similar policy was created for teachers in these schools. As one report stated: ‘It is not permissible for any teacher of religious studies to speak in a language other than Arabic.’29 Teachers of religious studies were required to be either Arabs or foreigners who met special requirements and did not take part in ‘sinful [Islamist] practices’.30 In instituting these policies, the regime worked to bring the Shi‘a religious schools under state control. It hoped to create a ‘unified’ curriculum among all religious schools in the country, regardless of sect, and to eliminate any school that attempted to preserve its independence.31 The regime used Shi‘a religious leaders whom it had co-opted to fill the mosques and husayniyyat (the halls that Shi‘as use for Qur’anic recitation circles and for commemoration ceremonies, especially during the month of Muharram). In an attempt to control them during the 1980s, the state authorised official Qur’an readers and preachers in every hussayniyya as well as in Shi‘a mosques.32 The regime then circulated the lists of the approved individuals among the security services along with orders to prevent all others from performing these roles.33 ‘Administrative and Party apparatuses’ also organised ‘meetings with the sermon givers to tell them 203

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to raise enthusiasm [for the regime] and to denounce the racist Iranian aggression’.34 Specifically, they ordered these preachers to denounce ‘the leader in Tehran’ for the ‘abuse of holy symbols in Holy Mecca during the Hajj’ and to praise Saddam.35 Similarly, the Union of Women of the Najaf Branch of the Party held meetings with female readers of the Qur’an to disseminate ‘what is required of them’ during these occasions.36 The Ba‘thists paired these restrictive measures with regime-sponsored ceremonies and propaganda highlighting a Ba‘thist view of religion that glorified the regime. In addition to the preachers and Qur’an readers who ‘repeatedly praised the party, the revolution, and the Victorious Leader, Saddam Hussein’,37 the regime ordered ‘the provincial directorate of the [Religious] Endowments to hoist two large black flags to commend the sacrifice of Imam Hussein’ and the ‘aggrandiz[ing of] the redemption of his descendent the Victorious Leader Saddam Hussein (may God preserve him)’.38

Early Results of Regime Policies By the mid-to-late 1980s, the regime’s records began to show the effects of the Ba‘thists’ policies. Through the combination of policies discussed above, the Ba‘thists were able to eliminate many of the independent religious schools in southern Iraq that were outside of the state’s control. For example, one 1988 report stated that ‘there were 19 [independent] religious schools in Najaf and Karbala until the year 1985 and as a result of the continuous cultural indoctrination, the number of schools in Najaf was reduced to two and they disappeared altogether from Karbala’.39 Moreover, the reports from this period were optimistic that the regime would eliminate or co-opt the remaining independent religious schools altogether in the near future. The regime had also assassinated or deported most of the senior Shi‘a scholars who openly opposed Ba‘thist rule. Conversely, the Ba‘thists promoted scholars who were willing to work with official state institutions. For example, the regime closely monitored Grand Ayatollah Khu’i and the network of Shi‘a scholars under his patronage. By mid-decade, one regime study listed 65 men of religion who were part the Khu’i network but were loyal to the ‘Party and the revolution’.40 Most of the scholars in the Khu’i network whom the regime considered suspicious were simply apolitical and refused to cooperate with the state. However, if one did cross the 204

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line into open hostility, or if the Ba‘thists suspected a scholar of aiding the Iranians, the consequences could be dire. As mentioned above, the regime executed several prominent scholars throughout the decade. In 1987, it killed Khu’i’s son-in-law and his son-in-law’s brother for their refusal to condemn the Iranian assault on Basra. The bodies were dumped unceremoniously at Khu’i’s house.41 By the end of the 1980s the regime’s records indicate that the state had made considerable inroads into the hawza, and that the Ba‘thists were able to monitor its activities in a much more effective manner. Shi‘as who lived in southern Iraqi during this period have generally confirmed the accuracy of these reports,42 as have independent investigations by the United Nations. One such investigation resulted in a 1992 report, confirming that:  ‘The number of clergy at Najaf had been reduced from eight or nine thousand twenty years ago to two thousand 10 years later and 800 before the uprisings in 1991.’43 Though the regime was never able to persuade Ayatollah Khu’i to abandon his apolitical stance, by the late 1980s he was elderly, and with the end of the Iran–Iraq War his neutrality was less problematic.

Rethinking State–Shi‘a Relations in the 1990s Throughout the 1980s the regime had mapped the religious landscape of southern Iraq and marginalised many of its opponents. Doing so facilitated the increasing role of the Ba‘thist controlled state in Shi‘a institutions and in Shi‘a religious life more generally. The subsequent uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 following the Gulf War provided an opportunity for the Ba‘thists to eliminate countless more Shi‘a religious leaders considered problematic by the regime. The 1992 United Nations report highlighted not only the decimation of the Shi‘a establishment during the 1980s but also its dire situation in 1991. The report claimed that following the uprising, ‘virtually all’ of Iraq’s Shi‘a clergy were ‘under arrest’ or had ‘disappeared’.44 When Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Tariq ‘Aziz, was asked about the location of these men, he replied, ‘if they have been executed, I’m not going to apologize for this’.45 By design, the religious leadership that survived these cataclysmic events included fewer scholars who refused to cooperate with state institutions. This helped to shape the Shi‘a religious landscape as well as its institutions in a manner favourable to the regime. Furthermore, the regime’s 205

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brutal response to the uprising had instilled a sense of terror among many Shi‘as that would last until 2003. As a result, one finds Shi‘a religious leaders working closely with the state, especially with its security services, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.46 Although the regime never again carried out repressive operations against the Shi‘a religious leadership on the scale that it had in 1991, Iraqi security services continued to act with uncompromising violence against any form of religious opposition. In the later years of the decade the regime executed several senior Shi‘a clerics and maintained a campaign of what the United Nations termed the ‘systematic suppression’ of the Shi‘a religious leadership.47 Two Ayatollahs were assassinated in 1998. Then a year later, the regime killed Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, as well as two of his sons.48 The regime’s violence should not be minimised but should rather be understood in the changing context of the relationship between the Shi‘a religious landscape and the Ba‘thist-controlled state. Throughout the 1990s, the regime carried out several comprehensive surveys of all mosques and religious institutions in Iraq. Mapping the landscape of religious institutions was an integral step towards applying state control over them. In doing so, the regime hoped to track potential threats and to identify individuals who might be useful. The local Ba‘th Party branches identified any influential religious leader who was a Ba‘thist or whom they felt could be potentially useful. With regard to Shi‘a areas, the Ba‘th Party Secretariat specifically asked for the names of students in the Najaf hawza who were Ba‘thists or who had a Ba‘thist family member. The names of these individuals were forwarded to the Directorate of General Security to ensure that they were being utilised to the fullest extent possible.49 Independent sources indicate that in the 1990s the Ba‘thist-controlled state was successful in penetrating the hawza. According to one nonBa‘thists student ‘[t]he government sent a hundred to a hundred and fifty young security and intelligence officers to be students and teachers’ in the hawza. He went on to explain that: … some of those who had important jobs in [Muhamad Sadiq] al-Sadr’s office became students only after the uprising of 1991 and after al-Sadr himself became important. So many new and strange people were entering the hawza that we knew they were from the intelligence agencies.50

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Al-Sadr sometimes attempted to mitigate this invasion. He had several approaches for determining who was truly a committed student and who was a regime agent. For example, he would ask students to take off their turbans and unravel them. Then he would ask the students to rewrap them. The committed students knew how to do so; the Ba‘thists did not.51 Nevertheless, the regime had begun its policy of inundating the hawza with Ba‘thists during the 1980s. However innovative the methods of alSadr and other senior ayatollahs were, they never came close to eliminating Ba‘thist influences in, and to some extent control over, the Shi‘a establishment. Indeed, the regime’s records show Shi‘a religious scholars at all levels working closely with the state. The combination of violence, manipulation and ultimately penetration of Shi‘a institutions in Iraq left Shi‘a religious leaders with few options beyond working with the state. This has become a contentious topic to discuss in post-2003 Iraq. Although almost no senior religious leader wishes to be associated with repression that occurred under Saddam’s brutal regime, many of those who now claim to have been dissidents were in fact coerced through imprisonment and torture into actively supporting the regime. By the mid-1990s, state institutions such as Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs exercised considerable control over even the most senior Shi‘a authorities. The ministry would even employ these Shi‘a scholars to write fatwas on the regime’s behalf.52 By the mid-1990s the regime had managed to wear down many prominent religious scholars who had resisted Ba‘thists’ overtures in the 1980s. After enduring a decade of Saddam’s rule, and with its end nowhere in sight, many formerly independent preachers, imams and even ayatollahs simply gave up their opposition. Some began to work actively for the regime. Shi‘a scholars who acted in this manner were able to conceal their relationship with the regime and were generally viewed as non-supportive of Saddam. Other scholars, such as Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who (at least in the late 1990s) were hostile to the regime were often portrayed as somehow aligned with Saddam and the Ba‘thists.53 Al-Sadr claimed that the regime had feigned support for him to undermine his reputation. He argued that the Ba‘thists knew that ‘anyone they oppose will ascend socially and people will think well of him, while anyone they endorse and praise, or at least look away from him, will descend socially and people will think 207

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ill of him’.54 Therefore, al-Sadr insisted, the regime publicly attacked certain scholars so that their reputation would improve, and it praised others whom the Ba‘thists actually opposed. Abbas Kadhim has argued that this dynamic has led to a widespread misconception about the relationship between Shi‘a scholars and the state. While it is far from definitive,55 some evidence for this phenomenon exists in the Ba‘thist archive. Shi‘a ayatollahs who were willing to support the regime also worked with the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs to conceal their cooperation. For example, when representatives from the ministry asked a senior ayatollah for two fatwas, he responded that he could issue one but not the other. His reasoning for not issuing the second fatwa was that he had recently published a fatwa on the subject and if he were to reverse his stance, everyone would know that the regime had persuaded him to do so. This would strip the fatwa of any authority and would undermine the standing of a senior ayatollah who was willing to assist the regime. The Ba‘thists accepted this as an appropriate precaution, and only requested that he issue one fatwa.56 Behind closed doors senior regime officials recognised that if their support for a Shi‘a religious leader was discovered, it would lead to his delegitimisation. As Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, put it, a Shi‘a religious leader would be ‘burnt as soon as he was recognised as a collaborator with the state and this will be the fate of anyone who works with the state’.57 Further confounding the ability of outside scholars of Iraq to understand state–society relations with regard to the Shi‘a community in the 1990s were issues of freedom of speech and travel. As mentioned above, the literature on 1990s Iraq has tended to highlight the increasing freedom of Iraqi religious leaders. This literature often interprets this increased freedom of as a sign of receding state control over the religious landscape, especially among the Shi‘as.58 However, as Abbas Kadhim has noted, ‘proregime religious figures enjoyed a more generous margin of freedom to express their strong views, albeit in a calculated way’.59 Correspondingly, the regime’s records suggest that the Ba‘thists permitted religious leaders working with the state to speak and travel more freely than those who resisted state control. As more religious scholars were co-opted, their ability to speak and travel increased. Thus, religious leaders’ increased ability to travel and speak publically could be interpreted as a sign of increased 208

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state domination, rather than – as it has been interpreted until now – as a sign of the state’s receding power. The regime’s archives have preserved several examples of this phenomenon among both Sunni and Shi‘a scholars.60 The case of one senior Shi‘a cleric is telling. He had been a known supporter of Muhammad Baqir alSadr in the 1970s and the regime arrested him after it assassinated al-Sadr in 1980. Later in the decade he was arrested again and brutally tortured. Yet in the late 1990s, he was able to speak publicly and travel outside the country. He even participated in religious delegations travelling to Western countries. The Ba‘thists would never have permitted him to do so in the 1980s. Without any further information, one might assume that the regime had loosened its restrictions on him. However, the archives reveal another explanation. By the mid-1990s, he had been completely co-opted and was actively working for the regime. When he travelled abroad, he did so as an agent of the state. He was not – as the Ba‘thists attempted to portray him – an independent member of a religious delegation. Instead, he acted as a spy, reporting back to the regime on sensitive issues and sometimes even condemning his counterparts for disloyalty. In one instance, he travelled to an important Western state. The purpose of the trip was to demonstrate to Western audiences (and Christian religious leaders) that Iraqis were suffering from an ‘American-Zionist attack’. After returning to Iraq, he met with regime officials. He claimed that the trip was successful. He was able to explain Iraq’s position to various Christian clergy, to the press and to other officials. However, he disagreed that the Iraqi ambassador in this particular state was not playing ‘any role in explaining the suffering of the Iraqi people’. Moreover the ambassador was not at all interested in assisting the delegation’s ‘patriotic mission’.61 The Director General of the Office of Party Secretariat in Baghdad was appalled. He sent a memo to Saddam explaining what had occurred. He insisted that the ambassador be removed from this sensitive post due to his obvious lack of ‘good morals’.62 The archives did not preserve the ambassador’s fate, but clearly he was in a precarious situation. It is important to note that this was not a case of passive acquiescence to regime policies, or simply a lack of resistance. The senior Shi‘a cleric could have remained quiet about his experience. After a decade of torture and imprisonment, the regime had wooed him with various incentives. 209

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These incentives were dependent on his providing such important details. Apparently the strategy worked. Moreover, this was not an isolated case. In another telling example, when the Ba‘thists assassinated Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr in 1999, they were able to use state control of the main Shi‘a mosques to deflect criticism. Several prominent Shi‘a scholars blamed Israel for the assassination. A commonly repeated story was that al-Sadr had predicted his own martyrdom and that he knew Israel would be behind it. Some quietist scholars simply encouraged an end to strife or encouraged unity. Others explicitly finished their sermons with a call for ‘long life and victory’ for Saddam.63 In mosques with less cooperative sermon-givers, the state intelligence services employed a network of spies and informants to quickly and quietly crush any potential unrest.64 And when resistance to the regime did manifest itself among the religious leadership, the regime could rely on other senior scholars to counter it. For example, after al-Sadr’s assassination, other senior Shi‘a scholars informed the Ba‘thists when and where his son, Muqtada, planned to hold prayers in remembrance of his father. As such, the security services crushed these potentially dangerous events before they even began.65 In some cases violence did break out. For example, in the days after the assassination, one finds reports of demonstrators marching towards local Ba‘th Party headquarters. In such instances, the Ba‘thists opened fired on the marchers, killing some, injuring many and quickly dispersing the crowds.66 The combination of violence and cunning that the regime employed allowed it to prevent potential disturbances from escalating into a real threat. These policies made it extremely difficult for any Shi‘a religious leader to resist the regime’s overtures. In September 2002, when war with the United States seemed increasingly probable, Saddam requested that the four remaining Grand Ayatollahs in Iraq issue pro-regime fatwas. The Grand Ayatollahs, including Sistani, condemned the Americans, portrayed Saddam’s regime as legitimately Muslim and argued that any Muslim who assisted the infidels in the overthrow of a Muslim regime would be severely punished in this life and the next. While such statements were not without basis in Islamic thought, they were a drastic departure from the political quietism that people like Sistani had espoused, and they were a clear indication of the regime’s power in the Shi‘a religious landscape.67 210

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Conclusion Throughout Saddam’s presidency, his Ba‘thist regime worked tirelessly to co-opt Shi‘a institutions and the scholars they contained to the Iraqi state. To do so, the regime employed two complementary strategies. First, it worked to ensure that the state controlled the finances, management and upkeep of Shi‘a institutions such as mosques and schools. Second, in institutions in which direct and overt state control proved difficult or counterproductive such as the hawza, the regime inundated them with its agents. This policy permitted the state to establish limits on discourse and political activity without formally controlling the institutions. Shi‘a institutions are designed not only to provide religious guidance but also to produce their own religious leaders. Thus the more that the Ba‘thists were able to co-opt institutions and tie them to the state, the more Shi‘a scholars were produced who were willing to work closely with the state. As such, state penetration of these institutions proved a self-reinforcing process. Of course, not all Shi‘as actively supported the regime. Many undoubtedly despised Saddam and secretly resisted the influence of the Ba‘thist-controlled state. However, doing so required extreme caution. Hostility toward Saddam, his regime or the state he controlled led to the severest of punishments and could only be expressed in private. Because of this fact, and because of the regime’s policy of maintaining enigmatic relationships with Shi‘a religious authorities, it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how much resistance actually occurred. Yet even those scholars who secretly despised the Ba‘thists were forced to work with the state on some level. Some did so openly and some did so secretly, but in the end almost no one could escape its influence.

Notes 1. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 2. This chapter relies on extensive research conducted using the Ba‘thist regime’s documents now housed at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, and the Ba‘th Regional Command Collection (BRCC) housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The former exist in Arabic and English translation. The latter are only available in Arabic.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 3. Achim Rohde, State-Society Relations in Ba’athist Iraq:  Facing Dictatorship (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 13. 4. Eric Davis, Memories of State:  Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 227. 5. Rohde, State-Society Relations in Ba’athist Iraq, p. 13. 6. Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century:  Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New  York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), pp. 329–30; Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear:  The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1998), p. xv. 7. For the regime’s strategy and plans on instituting Ba‘thification, see BRCC, ‘A project plan for working toward coordination between the Party and the mass organizations in the field of the Ba‘thification of society’, 025-5-5 (0476-0497), no date but from 1988 or earlier. See also Aaron M. Faust, ‘The Ba’thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘th Party’s system of control’, PhD dissertation, Boston University, Boston, MA, 2012. 8. Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 109; Ronen Zeidel, ‘On servility and survival: the Sunni opposition to Saddam and the Origins of the current Sunni leadership in Iraq’, in Amatzia Baram, Achim Rohde and Ronen Zeidel (eds), Iraq between Occupations: Perspectives from 1920 to the Present (New York, 2010), pp. 159–71, 163–5; Amatzia Baram, ‘From militant secularism to Islamism: the Iraqi Ba‘th regime 1968–2003’, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Occasional Paper, October 2011. 9. Chibli Mallat, ‘Religious militancy in contemporary Iraq: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr and the Sunni-Shi‘a paradigm’, Third World Quarterly 10/2 (April 1988), pp. 699–729, 724. 10. CRRC, ‘General Military Intelligence Directorate (GMID) studies on the foundation of the Dawah Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution Party’, SH-GMID-D-000-622, March–December 1995 11. See, for example, ‘Report’, BRCC, 046-3-6 (0621), 9 September 1984. 12. Mallat, ‘Religious militancy in contemporary Iraq’, pp.  699–729; Hanna Batatu, ‘Iraq’s underground Shi‘a movements: characteristics, causes and prospects’, Middle East Journal 354 (1981), pp. 578–94; Faleh A. Jabar, The Shi‘ite Movement in Iraq (London: Saqi Books, 2003). 13. Ofra Bengio, ‘Iraq’, in Ami Ayalon and Haim Shaked (eds), Middle East Contemporary Survey 1988, vol. 12 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), p. 519. 14. Abbas K. Kadhim, ‘The Hawza under siege: a study in the Ba‘th Party archive’, Occasional Paper 1, Boston University Institute for Iraqi Studies, June 2013. 15. BRCC, ‘A religious study on Marji’iyyah (source of emulation) at the Hawza’, 23-4-7 (0040-0041), undated, but probably from the early 1980s.

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SHI‘A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS 16. Ibid. 17. See BRCC, ‘The hawza and religious schools’, 23-4-7 (0109-0146); BRCC [Untitled Report], 23-4-7 (0174-0210). 18. BRCC, ‘A religious study on Marji’iyyah’. 19. BRCC, ‘Religious schools’, 23-4-7 (0088-0090), 9 March 1988. 20. BRCC, ‘A religious study on Marji’iyyah’. 21. Bengio, 1981: 514. 22. BRCC [Untitled Report], 23-4-7 (0174), 14 February 1985. 23. BRCC, ‘A religious study on Marji’iyyah’. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. BRCC, ‘Report’. 28. BRCC [Untitled Report], 14 February 1985. 29. BRCC, ‘Report’. 30. Ibid. 31. BRCC [Untitled Report], 14 February 1985. 32. BRCC, ‘The occasion of the 10th of Muharram’, 23-4-7 (0566-0570), 22 November 1983. 33. In 1983, for example, the police in one district were given a list of 163 authorised readers and told to prevent all others from doing so. See BRCC, ‘The occasion of the 10th of Muharram’, 23-4-7 (0574-0582), 8 November 1983. 34. BRCC, ‘The occasion of the Holy Month of Muharram’, 2135_0004 (0458), 18 August 1987. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. BRCC, ‘The occasion of the 10th of Muharram’. 38. BRCC, ‘The occasion of the Holy Month of Muharram’. 39. BRCC, ‘Religious schools’. 40. BRCC, ‘Study’, 23-4-7 (0064-0072), 23 February 1985. For examples of these lists and reports on various scholars in the Khu’i network see BRCC, 23-4-7 (0223-233) and (0235-0249). 41. Liz Thurgood, ‘The enemy within – kept at bay by ruthlessness’, The Guardian, 12 February 1987. 42. Abbas K. Khadim, Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012). 43. United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), Commission on Human Rights, ‘Report on the situation of human rights in Iraq’, prepared by Max van der Stoel, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, in Accordance with Commission 1991/74, 18 February 1992, p. 34.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 44. Ibid. 45. Bengio, ‘Iraq’, vol. 16, p. 476. 46. See, for example, BRCC, ‘Designation of a Mosque Imam’ and ‘Information’, 2753_0000 (0073-0089), August–October 1997. 47. ECOSOC, Commission on Human Rights, ‘Report’. 48. Ibid. 49. BRCC, Untitled, 2249-0000 (0004), 5 December 1998. 50. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada:  Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi‘a Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 95. 51. Ibid. 52. For a case that will shock many, see BRCC, ‘Issuing of a Fatwa’, 028-5-1 (0583-5), 19 May 1997. 53. For al-Sadr’s interaction with regime officials see ibid. 54. Kadhim, ‘The Hawza under siege’, pp. 64–6. 55. The evidence that Kadhim musters from the archive only deals with the later years of al-Sadr’s life and therefore does not refute the idea that he had maintained a better relationship with the regime earlier. 56. BRCC, ‘Issuing of a Fatwa’. 57. Kadhim, ‘The Hawza under siege’, p. 27. 58. Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq, p. 109. 59. Kadhim, ‘The Hawza under siege’, pp. 53–4. 60. In the following section, the names of Iraqi religious scholars and sometimes the sources on which I rely have been withheld to protect the identities of those involved. 61. BRCC, ‘Our travels to [withheld]’, 2348_0000 (0384), 3 June 1999. 62. Ibid. 63. BRCC, ‘Friday prayer’, 2348_0000 (0482-0483), 4 April 1999 and ‘Information’, 2348_0000 (0552), 22 February 1999. 64. See for example this exchange: BRCC, ‘Information’, 2348_0000 (0450), 8 May 1999; ‘Information’, 2348_0000 (0451), 18 May 1999; as well as ‘Information’, 2348_0000 (0338), 28 June 1999. 65. Ibid. 66. ‘Information’, 2348_0000 (0557), 22 February 1999. 67. Fatwas from the four highest ranking Shi‘a scholars in Najaf can be found in BRCC, 009-2-5 (0001-0007), September 2002.

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Part III

Communal Strife and Re-Emergent Authoritarianism in Post-2003 Iraq

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10 The Consolidation of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Integrity of the Iraqi State Gareth Stansfield

The stability of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (henceforth KR) and the ongoing maturation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has earned the Kurds a position of prominence in the literature covering developments in post-regime change Iraq. Once seen as the marginal outliers in the politics of Iraq, destined to be caught in a pattern of rebellion against whatever regime was in power in Baghdad, only to be followed by Baghdad’s retribution, the Kurds are now integral to Iraq’s future, or Iraq’s end. Since 2003, the KR has grown in stature and importance in Iraq and also in the wider Middle East region. With its status being formally codified as a federal region in the Constitution of 2005, the KR quickly become an alternative focus for states with interests in Iraq, but who found dealing with the increasingly sclerotic Government of Iraq to be fruitless.1 Since then, the KR’s engagement with regional states – including Turkey, Iran and also Arab countries of the Middle East  – has grown markedly with Erbil, the capital of the KR, now being home to 32 consulates and foreign representations. Perhaps even more striking has been the volte-face in Ankara’s relationship with the Kurds of Iraq. From being once determinedly opposed to the existence of the KR, Ankara has embarked upon a series of bilateral relations with Erbil, including signing several oil and gas export agreements against the wishes of the Government of Iraq and 217

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pursuing policies towards Erbil that, far from assisting in the maintaining of the integrity of Iraq, set the scene for Kurdistan’s possible secession.2 The existence and furthering of the KR is also reshaping the landscape of the Middle East state system and, particularly since the declaration of the establishment of the Islamic State in 2014, has also carved out a position of some importance on the international stage. But many questions remain unanswered about its development, including questions about its internal stability, its democratic characteristics, and what is, in effect, an increasingly symbiotic relationship with the Government of Iraq in the areas of security, oil exports and finance. These questions are of increasing interest to observers and policy makers concerning the impact of an evermore autonomous KR and the possibility of it metamorphosing into the independent (second) Republic of Kurdistan.3 This chapter seeks to answer some of these questions and investigates the development of the KR of Iraq. It does so by initially outlining the formation of the KR and the post-2003 Kurdish approach to federalism. The second section investigates the consolidation of the KR as an autonomous, de facto, entity and considers state–society relations within the region itself since 2003. While the KR has witnessed a rapid growth in civil society organisations and has embarked upon an ambiguous path of democratisation, this has created stresses and strains as the transition has proceeded quickly and, at times, has suffered setbacks. This section therefore considers the durability of state–society relations in the KR, placing processes of democratisation alongside notions of traditional legitimacy, political party patronage and the protection of political legacies. The final section considers the future of the KR and the integrity of Iraq following the emergence of the Islamic State in 2014.

The Origins of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq The KR of today is somehow ‘different’ to other parts of Iraq. Observers often point to the stability of the region, or to its relative openness to foreign visitors. They often point to the vibrancy of the three major cities – Erbil, Suleimaniyah and Dohuk  – and the amounts of investment that have occurred there in recent years that have transformed what were once very much underdeveloped towns into major cities that are the economic, 218

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cultural and political hubs for hinterlands of considerable extent.4 These differences are magnified by the very real ethnic specificities of the Kurds compared to their counterpart nationalities in Iraq, and especially the Arabs. Whether one views ethnicity through a constructivist lens and sees ethnic divisions, in the case of the Kurds, as reactions to the realities imposed on societies by states ‘owned’ by dominant nations, or through a primordialist lens, viewing ethnic identity as a product of a distant prehistoric past that has remained to the present, it remains the case that the Kurds of today view themselves as being distinctive.5 Just how far back such notions of distinctiveness reach is a subject that is hotly debated by academics across a variety of disciplines, with some arguments, particularly from Kurdish intellectuals, reaching back into the distant past, imagining a Kurdish-defined polity stemming from the ancient empires of the region. However, for the purposes of tracing the formative moments of the KR of Iraq, it is necessary to only delve as far back as the twentieth century, first to the aftermath of World War I, and second to the period following the end of World War II. What to do with the Kurds of Iraq was not a subject at the top of the list of matters to address for Western policy makers as World War I was drawing to a close  – although what to do with the mountainous region that existed north of the plains of Mesopotamia and at the edges of the Anatolian land mass certainly was. Inside Iraq, the situation in the period following the end of World War I  was confusing. While there was the germ of a Kurdish nationalist agenda being nurtured by some prominent leaders – most notably among them being Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji of Suleimaniyah – the political landscape remained highly fractured. Apart from Sheikh Mahmoud’s attempts to rally Kurdish tribes into some semblance of a nationalist rebellion on two occasions, in 1918 and 1922, the British found it straightforward to put their own imperial interests ahead of any concerns of whether the Kurdish-dominated areas of the Mosul vilayet would be best served by being made into an independent state or incorporated into the newly created Iraq. The formal acceptance in 1926 by Britain and Turkey of the League of Nations decision to incorporate the Mosul vilayet into Iraq saw the Kurds partitioned by the postwar settlement, and the Kurds of Iraq begin what would be nearly a century of marginalisation and suppression.6 219

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The state system of the Middle East not only imposed an artificial order on the Kurds, it also served as a catalyst for the growth of nationalist sentiment, ideology and, ultimately, action. Being located at the peripheries of new countries that were themselves implementing new projects of ethno-nationalist state-building  – of Turkish-dominance in Turkey, Persian dominance in Iran and Arab dominance in Iraq and Syria – the Kurdish populations in these countries became transformed in reaction to these new developments, with the Kurds becoming reactive nationalists, pricked by the advances made by those nations that controlled the state into mimicking their rhetoric and nationalist ideology.7 The post-World War II period in particular saw these transformations unfurl quickly, with once-tribally motivated figures such as Mulla Mustafa Barzani embrace notions of the broader imagined nation of the Kurds, himself learning quickly from the lessons of the Iranian Kurds in Mahabad where Kurdish leader Qazi Mohammed managed to establish the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan in 1946.8 It was in these dangerous years following World War II that the Kurdish nationalist imagination exploded and expanded, and it was in these years that the actors that populate the Kurdish political landscape of today can be traced, whether in Turkey, Iran or Iraq. In Iraq, a variety of political movements had formed among the Kurds – some during the monarchical period and many afterwards, with the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) taking a leading role at the time of its establishment in 1946. Formed in the aftermath of the fall of the Republic of Kurdistan in Mahabad, the KDP brought together two components of Kurdish society  – the rural tribal and the urban intellectual  – that the nationalist project needed in order to survive and prosper. These two components, headed by Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Ibrahim Ahmed, with his protégé Jalal Talabani, represented the two tectonic plates of modern Kurdish political life in Iraq that would ultimately contest power between them at the detriment of the larger nationalist project for the remainder of the century until today.9 By the 1960s, the idea of a Kurdistan ‘region’ – an area of territory in which the Kurds would exist semi-autonomously within Iraq – had taken hold. Indeed, as early as the 1960s, if not before, it seems that the clarion cry of Kurdish independence was already deemed to be merely something for those with a vivid imagination, and that the most appropriate course 220

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of action to follow was a self-determination strategy that would lead to autonomy within the extant state. Yet this pragmatism does not seem to have reduced the fears of the central state authorities in Baghdad, who seemed to maintain a persistent belief in the secessionist tendencies of the Kurds. Viewed from Baghdad, perhaps this is understandable. With their penchant for allying with enemies and being conveniently placed proxies that could be mobilised to put Baghdad under pressure, the view of the Kurds as being irreconcilable and discontented to the point of not sharing the same patriotism towards the country of Iraq was easily associated with secessionism. Following the coup d’état of 1958 which brought the military regime of Abd al-Karim Qassem to power in Baghdad, the Barzani-led Kurdish rebels managed to carve out swathes of territory, inflicting significant defeats on what was a very much weakened Iraqi military. This established a pattern that saw the Iraqi government make concessions to the Kurds when the state was weak, only to buy time and then seek to re-impose their authority in the north when the state was strong.10 This pattern, with some variations, remained in place throughout the 1960s, and ultimately saw Saddam Husayn visit Mulla Mustafa in 1970 to negotiate terms with the doughty Kurdish leader who had, following the second Ba‘th revolution, taken advantage of Baghdad’s weakness and was now more powerful than at any time before.11 It is at this moment in history that the origins of the KR can be discerned in terms of its parameters and internal structures actually being defined and written into an agreement. The March Agreement of 1970 was not wholly original but was a further development of the declaration made on Kurdish cultural rights within a framework of limited autonomy by Prime Minister Abd al Rahman Bazzaz in 1966.12 Barzani was, by this time, at his most powerful, but he still had to deal with wide-scale damage and destruction in Kurdistan caused by years of conflict with Baghdad, and remained perhaps even more focused on the need to outmanoeuvre his arch-rivals Ibrahim Ahmed and Jalal Talabani. As such, both sides negotiated the terms of an agreement that would form the blueprint of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq – including Kurdish being recognised alongside Arabic, Kurds participating fully in the government of Iraq, fiscal transfers, and minimum legislative and administrative powers. The period between 1970 and 1974 was an interesting period for an autonomous region in 221

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a totalitarian state, with Kurdish autonomy in Iraq (known in Arabic as al-hukm al-dhati) giving the Kurds the opportunity to gain experience in administration and governance through their holding of positions in the autonomous administration, while they also had a formally appointed Minister for Northern Affairs in the person of Sami Abdul Rahman  – a close ally of Mulla Mustafa – in Baghdad.13 While these were all forwardlooking in their nature, what could not be agreed upon is perhaps even more pertinent to understanding the realities of today’s situation. Just as Erbil and Baghdad have failed to resolve the status of the disputed territories, and especially the ownership of Kirkuk, so too did the Ba‘th and Barzani fail to agree on this most sensitive of issues. Demanding the inclusion of Kirkuk and Kurdish-populated areas around Khanaqin, Barzani presented a problem that would not be resolved – a problem that would see the collapse of the first autonomy arrangement for the Kurds, in 1975, and one that would continue to be a source of dangerous contention between Baghdad and Erbil to the present day.14 By the end of 1973, relations between the two sides had deteriorated to a dangerously low point, with Mulla Mustafa preparing his peshmerga for war against Iraqi forces. Saddam, however, was biding his time. Well aware that to fight Barzani while Iran was providing support across a porous border would leave Iraqi forces woefully exposed, Saddam was moving towards a deal with Tehran that succumbed to their demands concerning the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the south of the country, in exchange for Tehran’s severing ties with Barzani. With disagreement still raging over the status of Kirkuk, Baghdad moved ahead with unveiling its own Autonomy Law, exactly four years to the day of the signing of the March Agreement, and gave Barzani two weeks in which to accept its terms. While still surpassing any previous legislation, the law fell short of Kurdish demands regarding Kirkuk. With the recommencement of conflict came the news that Baghdad and Tehran had settled their dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Iranian forces then withdrew their supporting missions with the Kurds and terminated Iranian supplies to the peshmerga.15 With no support, and facing a reorganised and disciplined Iraqi military, the Kurdish forces were defeated. Barzani was forced into exile in Iran, and the Kurds were left in disarray.16 In the aftermath of defeat, Talabani and his key counterparts declared 222

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the formation of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), with the KDP entering a period of rebuilding under the leadership of Mulla Mustafa’s sons, Idris and Massoud.17 It would take 15 years for the Kurds to be in a position whereby they could seize control and resurrect their plans for an autonomous region. This region, when it did appear in 1991, would then be recognised as the first KR – appearing in the chaotic aftermath of Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait and as a Kurdish reaction to the genocidal decade of the 1980s. Yet the roots of this region, and of the Kurds’ thinking towards autonomy and self-determination that would ultimately have a formative role in the ordering of post-Saddam Iraq after 2003, reach back to the unstable years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Kurds under Mulla Mustafa Barzani came so close to achieving their aims.

The Formation and Institutionalisation of the Kurdistan Region Today it is taken for granted that the Kurds of Iraq have an autonomous region that exercises a high degree of independence, albeit within the framework of the state of Iraq. What does not seem to be very well understood is how unlikely was the emergence of a KR if one were to review the situation from a viewpoint in the late 1980s, before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. At this time, northern Iraq was a devastated war zone. The Ba‘th regime had successfully implemented a strategy of genocide and the depopulation of the rural areas of the north known as the Anfal Campaign, which also resulted in the retreat of Kurdish forces to safe havens in the Iranian mountains.18 If it were not for a series of unprecedented events (Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and the reaction of Western powers) that would then create a set of anomalous situations (Saddam’s defeat, Western intervention and Western/international protection of the Kurds) that would give the Kurds geographical and political gaps to exploit, then it is very unlikely indeed that the Kurds of Iraq would have been able to build the sub-state entity that is the KR as a perennial feature on the map of Iraq. Indeed, it is far more likely that the situation and status of the Kurds in Iraq would be comparable to their kinspeople in Syria or Iran and Turkey. 223

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What is of direct relevance to this chapter are three dynamics – the first being the effective institutionalisation of the ‘idea’ not only of the KR, but of the legitimacy and the norm of Kurdish governance; the second being the development in the thinking of Kurdish elites and the embracing of federalism as a plan for a future Iraq; and the third being the manner in which Kurds – whether politically connected or not – began to view not only their position as Kurds in Iraq, but as Kurds in Kurdistan, living under a KRG.

The institutionalisation of the Kurdistan Region The KR endured a tortuous existence following its establishment in 1991. With Saddam withdrawing his government and military forces from Kurdish-dominant areas in October 1991, the Kurds existed in a political vacuum. To their credit, the newly returned KDP and PUK did not fall into the trap of simply declaring independence – as many thought they would – but instead sought international help to organise elections for a national assembly that would then form a regional government. The elections, held in May 1992, were an astonishing feat to organise in such a setting at such a chaotic moment, but the results were quite predictable – being a near even split between the KDP and PUK. The resulting falling out between the two was also similarly predictable. Memories of the feuding between Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani in the 1970s and the internecine conflict between the KDP and PUK in the late 1970s and 1980s were all too raw in the early 1990s – and the two parties fell into civil war from 1994 onwards, effectively dividing the KR into two ‘Kurdistan Regions’ and drawing Iraq, Iran and Turkey into the affairs of the fledgling entity. Irrespective of the conflict that characterised this difficult first decade of the newly formed KR, the fact that it survived served to institutionalise the idea of the region as a norm not only for the Kurds living within its boundaries, but also in the wider region and international community. During this decade, the KDP and PUK had to embark upon some painful transitions, from being military-focused organisations to being political parties that had to compete in elections; from having relatively limited exposure to critical inquiry to increasingly being the subject of critical investigations by journalists, academics and an increasingly active civil society movement; and from being largely unaccountable in the past to being very much 224

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accountable in the present. The outcome is that the political system of the KR itself has been undergoing a rapid maturation – sometimes too rapid, some critics would contend – that has seen the political parties responding to the demands of wider Kurdish society. These responses have often been directed through the activities of the party-controlled KRG but, here too, the basic trajectory has been one of positive developments through successive KRGs which have attempted to rationalise their actions, to improve their efficiencies and to lead the KR on a sustainable path. Much remains to be done, and criticism of the KRG stemming from the dominance and corruption of the political parties and lack of transparency of the entire system, abound. But the fact remains that the KR, and its government, has become institutionalised not only in terms of it having the physical attributes of the executive, legislative and judicial machineries of state, but in terms of it being a legitimate idea in the minds of the Kurds who live there, and neighbouring states that have begun to engage with it as if it were a state.

From autonomy to federalism The Kurdish leadership between 1975 and 1991 began to articulate their policy aims with federalism being at the forefront of their arguments. They found themselves pushing at an open door. With the Iraqi opposition to Saddam beginning to form in earnest in the aftermath of the defeat in Kuwait and the aligning of Western countries against Iraq, the disparate Iraqi opposition forces desperately needed the Kurds to be working with them as they, alone among all the opposition groups, actually had control of a significant block of Iraqi territory. With parts of the Iraqi opposition leadership being very Western in their outlook, with a long history of living and working in Western countries, it was seemingly of no concern to offer the Kurdish leaders the promise of a federal Iraq at the first meeting of the opposition in Vienna in June 1992. The follow-up conference, in Salahadin in August, saw the umbrella Iraqi National Congress (INC) formed and embraced federalism as a future system of government in a post-Saddam Iraq.19 The Kurds were keen not only to suggest that federalism was an appropriate structure and method of government for them, but also for other parts of Iraq. Their intention from the outset, it seems, 225

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was to devolve as much power as possible from Baghdad to the regions – thus making Basra, for example, on a par with the Kurdistan Region, and Baghdad all the weaker for it. Whether this was a beneficial strategy for them to take, compared to simply pursuing autonomy for themselves, is now debated. Perhaps their post-2003 future would have been easier if they were simply trying to find an arrangement with Baghdad that would preserve their autonomy while not also trying to facilitate the foundation of further regions, for example. Or perhaps such a strategy would have exposed rather than empowered the Kurds, as agents of Iraq’s division. Addressing this issue will probably come in the period following the rise of IS, when the Kurds, along with other Iraqis, have the opportunity to once again restructure, or disintegrate, the state. For the Kurds, this acceptance of federalism was viewed as being a commitment that would be implemented when Saddam was removed. It is highly unlikely, however, that the other components of the opposition viewed it in quite such stark terms. Most of the opposition parties at this time would likely have viewed federalism as little more than a scheme pursued by the Kurds to ultimately secede from the state, which, for the ardent Iraqi nationalists who populated the opposition at this time, was an unacceptable possibility to consider. However, the opposition movements viewed federalism as a means to ensure Kurdish cooperation up to the moment Saddam was deposed. For the Kurds, the KRG was further developed as they overcame their intra-ethnic fighting. More thought was given not only to notions of federalism in its starkest form, but to the more nuanced considerations of the distribution of power in devolved systems of government, to the power-sharing possibilities of consociationalism and the distribution and management of natural resources. By March 2003, the Kurdish leadership was intellectually well prepared for the power-sharing debates that unfolded and the defence and further advancement of Kurdish autonomy within a federal Iraqi framework.20

The demands of the electorate From its founding in the early 1990s, the KR was developing rapidly in the areas of governmental development, party political maturation and wider international relations.21 But it was also developing even more quickly in 226

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terms of the political expectations of the Kurds at large. The shock to the Kurds of Iraq in the days and months following Saddam’s retreat from the north and the establishment of Kurdish governance must have been extreme, leaving the people of Kurdistan to decide on their future. But progress was halting and slow, and in the 1990s the KDP and PUK proved to be far more adept at fighting each other than progressing Kurdistan’s cause and improving the standard of living for the average citizen. Compounding these realities was the continuation of traditional Kurdish socio-political structures of control and empowerment through increasingly powerful patronage networks dominated by families that were tied closely to the leading political parties. In effect, the emergence of the KR provided the KDP and PUK with an enhanced set of facilities to further control political life through the provision of patronage – whether jobs, contracts, or simply base corruption – to their loyalists.22 It was a pattern of activity that would begin to store up significant problems for both parties as the years progressed. By 1997, for example, the moderate Islamist party, the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), had begun to make inroads into the support base of the KDP on the basis of simply not being the KDP, and was showing itself to be popular not only among those who were not connected into the party political system in such a way as to enjoy the fruits of their patronage. Later in the 2000s the PUK also became the focus of a strong anti-establishment protest, but this time from within its own ranks as Talabani’s deputy, Nawshirwan Mustafa, along with several other leading PUK figures, broke away with a significant part of the PUK membership to form the Gorran (Change) Movement in 2009.23 In many ways the political system of the KR is very different today from what it was in the 1990s. While the ability of the two main parties to project their power and influence across their core base remains strong, they must do so with a careful eye on what the increasingly free media scrutiny of their actions both domestically and by the international community. Political leaders in the KR now have to contend with three interrelated issues. First, the stabilising and growing economic wellbeing of the KR; second, providing of security for the KR against internal enemies and external threats; and third, protecting the region’s autonomy and the furthering of autonomy to independence. These three issues interact in dangerous ways for the KR’s leadership, and not least because it is extremely difficult to 227

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achieve positive outcomes in all three areas at the same time. Consider, for example, what seems to be a majority aspiration of the Kurdish electorate to see the region secede from Iraq as an independent state. If this were to happen, it is very likely that such a decision would promulgate a serious upsurge in security concerns and also limit the resources available to the Kurdish economy, thus damaging socio-economic indicators. A different scenario, of Kurdish economic advancement achieved by coordinating efforts far more closely with Baghdad, would probably see the Kurdish leadership disappoint their electorate not in terms of providing a better economic footing for the region but in terms of sacrificing the possibility of independence from Iraq. While these are rather simplistic renditions of some very complex problems, they serve to illustrate just how difficult the task of leading the KR has become.

The Kurdistan Region, the Islamic State and the Future of Iraq The events of 11 September 2001 were viewed with serious concern by the KR’s leaders. Occupying a prime position in the assembled ranks of the different Iraqi opposition movements that had been vying for the attention of the US throughout the 1990s, the Kurds could see all too clearly how some Arab opposition leaders were succeeding in linking 9/11 to Saddam Husayn’s Iraq. The US move to invading Iraq in 2003, removing the Ba‘th regime and occupying the country for over eight years, has been well documented. What have not been so clearly portrayed, however, are the deep-seated misgivings of Kurdish leaders about the idea of taking military action against Saddam. Kurdish leaders, along with the majority of Kurdish popular sentiment at the time, were deeply concerned about the threat posed to the region by Saddam, if the US were to attack Iraq. Remembering all too clearly the earlier genocidal acts committed by the Ba‘th regime against them, the Kurds were fearful that they would bear the brunt of Saddam’s reprisals. This fear only diminished in the days following what was a clear collapse of the Iraqi army and state. A  further concern was also apparent among Kurdish leaders, and this was to do with the unpredictability of what would happen the day after Saddam’s removal. Even by 2003, 228

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Kurdish leaders had still largely failed to gain the favour of Western supporters to the degree that would make them feel comfortable in a game of reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq. Compounding this was an additional concern:  while the Arab opposition groups had agreed ‘in principle’ to the notion of a future federal Iraq, no-one was under any illusion that the actual statebuilding of post-Saddam Iraq would be different to the theoretical games played out in the 1990s. The Kurdish leaders thus viewed regime change in Iraq as a double-edged sword:  removing Saddam was clearly positive, but in so doing the very existence of the autonomous KR could be undermined or even challenged. From the outset the Kurdish leaders forced onto their Iraqi counterparts and US authorities certain red lines that, while the ramifications for crossing them were never particularly clear, still served to ensure that Kurdish sensitivities were acknowledged and assuaged. At the top of the list of the Kurdish red lines was the continued existence of the region itself. At a time when figures in the US government had been questioning the need for the continuation of the Kurdish entity in Iraq, the Kurds needed to force the issue. Beyond this protection of the region, the Kurds also focused heavily on negotiating the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) of 2004, which was the forerunner of the Constitution of 2005. Realising that these documents would be critical in ordering Iraq’s affairs for some time to come, the Kurdish leaders focused their efforts on ensuring that their interests were met in the constitutional drafting committee. They paid close attention to the division of powers between the centre (Baghdad) and the regions (at this time, only Kurdistan), specifying how future regions could then be formed. The Kurds were also very much fixated on the management of natural resources and the defence of the KR, and again tying these questions into the structural negotiations over the federal nature of the state. The end result was a constitution, passed by a popular referendum in 2005 that the Kurds, on the whole, accepted as being in their interests. However, having the constitution in writing was one thing, putting the it into practice proved to be a much more difficult and fraught task.24 The pattern of relations between Erbil and Baghdad since the passing of the Constitution of Iraq in 2005 interestingly mimicked the pattern established under the military regimes from the 1960s onwards – albeit without the regular punctuation of military incursions and guerrilla rebellion. 229

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In essence, when Baghdad was in some way political or militarily weak, then concessions would be given to the Kurds; and when Baghdad had recovered its strength, the concessions would be taken back, by force if necessary. This pattern became largely the norm for engagements between Baghdad and Erbil under the premiership of Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his successor, Nouri al-Maliki, and was normally focused upon the Kurds’ interpretation of their autonomous rights as prescribed in the rather ambiguously worded constitution, and with particular reference to the development and exploitation of natural resources.25 The relationship between Erbil and Baghdad would be maintained not by any meeting of minds over the complex questions of power-sharing, defence and hydrocarbons exploitation. Indeed, even with US attempting to be the midwife to a hydrocarbon law as early as 2007, Baghdad and Erbil remained in stubborn stalemate over the rights and responsibilities of the regions (i.e. Kurdistan) to manage its own affairs.26 Rather, the relationship was perversely maintained by the deterioration of security and the rise of a powerful, multifaceted, Sunni insurgency movement. With the destruction of the Shi‘a Askariyya shrine in Samarra in February 2006, Iraq was thrown into a sectarian civil war that would rage for the next two years, and which would only end when the US increased its military presence while seeking to co-opt Sunni Arab leaders with promises of future political reform. During this time the Kurds’ relationship with their counterparts in Iraq – whether Sunni, Shi‘a or Turkmen – worsened. With the replacing of Ibrahim al-Jaafari with Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq there was some hope in Kurdish elite circles that the new premier – relatively unknown and seemingly affable enough to them – would be at least easier to control and influence than the formidable Jaafari. However, this proved to be wishful thinking. By the end of 2006, the old flashpoint between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens – the status of Kirkuk – had once again assumed a position of prominence. The Kurds pushed for the implementation of Article 140 of the constitution, which designated a plan of action to determine the legal status of the disputed territories lying immediately to the south of the KR, and including Kirkuk by the end of 2007.27 However, without a willing partner in the form of the Iraqi Prime Minister, the Kurds could not simply implement the article. UN mediation led to an extension of six months, which passed without anything further happening. Failing to deliver Kirkuk, the KRG leadership then moved to play its card of 230

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last resort – its use of the Kurds’ veto power over the legislative process in Baghdad, and even the threat of withdrawing from the government itself.28 Al-Maliki, however, proved to be made of sterner stuff than the Kurds had initially believed. Following successful offensives against Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Basra in 2008, al-Maliki manoeuvred the Iraqi army into positions around the largely Kurdish town of Khanaqin, a town to the southeast of Kirkuk that had been in Kurdish hands since 2003. The subsequent military standoff over Khanaqin was a harbinger of the tensions that would bring the Kurds closer to open warfare with Baghdad than at any time since Mulla Mustafa Barzani recommenced his offensives against Baghdad in the mid-1970s. Once again it was not the finding of a resolution between Baghdad and Erbil that tempered the rhetoric between the two. Rather, it was the resurgence of Sunni Arab challenges to the post-2003 status quo that forced Erbil and Baghdad into acting more moderately towards each other. The elections of 2010 will likely prove a watershed in Iraq’s history – not because of how the elections were conducted, but for how the results of the election, which saw a marginal victory for the Iraqiyya block, strongly associated with the Sunni Arab vote, ignored in the ensuing power-play for positions in Baghdad. Al-Maliki subsequently maintained his premiership, with promises made to Iraqiyya and the Kurds for power-sharing mechanisms to be introduced simply ignored. Worse was to come for the disappointed Sunnis. With al-Maliki showing his sectarian colouring, he moved to further weaken the Sunni political establishment, ordering the arrest on charges of terrorism of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi and later, the very well regarded Rafi al-Issawi. The often violent targeting of demonstrations against the al-Maliki government across Sunni-dominated provinces only served to cultivate further an environment in which Sunni forces that would choose violence over politics would grow and prosper. This force was the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Emerging from the ashes of the previous incarnation of Sunni Arab Islamist and nationalist insurgencies, and combined with the professionalism and skill of the military units of Saddam’s regime, ISIS grew its power-base in the chaos of the Syrian civil war from 2011, before returning to Sunni areas of Iraq in 2013 – areas that proved to be receptive to this new, determined and highly aggressive force. 231

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By the beginning of 2014, the tension that had emerged between Erbil and Baghdad had become palpable. Erbil, pursuing its own independent oil export strategy, had been met by an intransigent Iraqi government with Prime Minister al-Maliki deploying the economic weapon of limiting the amounts of funds made available to the KRG to operate. This made the KRG even more determined to find independent sources of finance from oil export.29 The rhetoric had become very dangerous, and it is interesting to imagine what would have happened if ISIS had not made such a spectacular statement by capturing Mosul on 9 June and carving out their own de facto state in Sunni Arab dominated areas of Iraq stretching from Mosul to Fallujah. Would al-Maliki have ordered the military occupation of Erbil? Would Massoud Barzani, feeling the weight of his father’s legacy, have demanded the incorporation of Kirkuk into the KR and the recognition of the inherent binational character of the Iraqi state between Kurds and Arabs? Neither is impossible to imagine, and would have been in keeping with the pattern of politics that has been in place since at least the 1960s. But the rise of ISIS arguably presents a watershed in Iraqi politics – one that redefines not only the position of the Sunni Arabs in the post-Saddam state but of the Kurds as well.30 The Kurdish leadership was uniquely placed to witness the rise of ISIS. For several months, if not years, before the invasion of Mosul, Kurdish leaders had been forewarning of the growing rise in anti-government sentiment among Sunni Arabs to the south of the KR. They had also been very much aware of the weakening hold the Iraqi Security Force (ISF) had in Mosul. Their information was coming from a variety of sources. They were receiving regular visitations from concerned Sunni Arab tribesmen who understood fully how Sunni Arab resentment towards the al-Maliki government could be turned into something extremely dangerous. The Kurds were also watching with great concern the deployment of ISF units – and particularly those of the Dijla Operations Command outside Kirkuk – fearing that al-Maliki was positioning his forces with the intention of using them against the KR in the future. However, their observations of the ISF revealed a distinct lack of combat readiness. Nonetheless, the speed with which ISIS captured Mosul and great swathes of the disputed territories and then attacked the Kurds on three broad fronts in August 2014 shocked Kurdish leaders. This disaster was only 232

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avoided due to the quick response of Western air power in defence of the KR. But just as the Kurds adapted to the setting of the near disaster of 1991, so too have they responded to the changed circumstances brought about in 2014. With Iraq now effectively partitioned into three sub-states – a KR, an Islamic State and a Baghdad-Basra government – the reality not only of Kurdistan’s autonomy but of its importance is now changing the pattern of relations between Baghdad and Erbil, and between Erbil and regional and international powers. Consider, for example, the once extremely destabilising issue of Kirkuk, and the production of oil from Kirkuk. The new reality of there being an Islamic State to the west of Kirkuk, thus preventing any export of oil from Kirkuk south to the Baiji refinery and then into the oil pipeline that now runs through Islamic State territory to Ceyhan in Turkey, has prompted a new, albeit tenuous agreement between Erbil and Baghdad. This agreement allows Erbil to export oil from Kirkuk, and from its own fields, in return for 17 per cent of the budget of Iraq. Consider, too, the manner in which the peshmerga forces of Kurdistan are now to be funded – directly from Baghdad, rather than having to be funded from the coffers of the Kurds. The fact that the Government of Iraq not only formally accepts the legitimacy of the peshmerga but also funds them to fight in the interests of Iraq reveals the extent to which ISIS have been a game-changer in Iraq. Consider, further, the manner in which Western powers have come to the aid of the Kurds, largely in a bilateral fashion, or paying only lip service to ensuring that the Government of Iraq is in agreement with plans as sensitive as weapons transfers and the basing of military hardware inside the KR itself. As nearly two years passed from the fall of Mosul, the Kurds found themselves in a peculiar position. While they were more autonomous than they had ever been, while the grasp of government of Iraq on their affairs was weaker than ever before and while the Kurds were now largely managing their own oil reserves and also exporting those of Kirkuk, the political cohesion of the Kurdistan Region was fragile. Compared to the late 1990s in particular – when the KDP and PUK were divided and there was little economic development that could take place in a region embargoed by the UN and by the Government of Iraq  – the political stability of the Kurdistan Region was very poor indeed. Seemingly, with the stakes being raised by the prominence of revenue (which then fell with 233

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the crash along with the price of oil in 2016) combined with the ongoing contestation for power between the KDP and PUK leaderships, the Kurdistan Region looked to be once again falling into disarray, with other regional states – and namely Iran, Turkey and Iraq – becoming involved in its affairs and with the Kurds seemingly having Western allies for only as long as IS remained a threat. By the summer of 2016, President Barzani had called for a referendum to decide the fate of the Kurds in Iraq. Of course, the vote, if it were to take place (presumably in the autumn of that year) would almost certainly be a highly resounding ‘yes’. But, the question would still remain, would President Barzani use this mandate to negotiate for further autonomy – perhaps in a confederal arrangement in Iraq – or to legitimise a declaration of independence? And, if the latter, would Iraq, Turkey and Iran allow this?

Conclusion Kurdish history in Iraq over the last 50 years is a complicated affair. The post-World War II exploits of figures such as Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani and the struggle to secure basic autonomy was mostly viewed by the Iraqi state as an issue to manage until it could be quashed by force of arms. Yet in these difficult years, the Kurds’ understanding of autonomy, federalism and their own standing in the wider region developed in increasingly sophisticated ways, ultimately placing them in a position of prominence and influence as the anomalous geopolitical situation of the 1990s unfolded. Since then, the Kurds managed to ensure that postSaddam Iraq was theoretically constructed to their liking, but in practice they have failed to achieve the levels of autonomy they desired. From 2003 onwards the Kurds found themselves limited all too easily by the ability of Baghdad to use economic pressure against them, let alone by the ever-escalating tensions between Erbil and al-Maliki’s government. However, the situation since 2014 once again presents a watershed in the politics of Iraq, just as 1991 and 2003 had done  – one that perhaps points to a future Iraq that would only be held together by a federal structure built upon the brutal simplicity of a three-way division between Kurdistan-, Sunni Arab- and Shi‘a Arab-dominated territories. The alternative is a situation whereby the three parts of Iraq break with the ties 234

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that have bound them and find their own way, one as a Shi‘a-dominated state tied perilously close to Iran, another as a pariah Sunni Arab jihadist state, and Kurdistan as a Western-friendly, landlocked state very much dependent upon the continued good will of Turkey and Iran. The prospect of an independent Kurdish state is perhaps more likely in the near future than any time since the collapse of the Republic of Kurdistan in Iran some 70  years ago. Whichever way the Kurdish story in Iraq turns, there will remain a delicate interplay between the political aspirations of its people, the political will of the leadership and the economic and regional factors that may prove to be compulsive in the preservation of the integrity of Iraq. But it is a story that will be one of the most important to follow in the future, as the Kurdish issue in Iraq is now one that has a direct effect upon many different aspects of regional politics.

Notes 1. Haider Ala Hamoudi, Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2014). 2. Gareth R. Stansfield, ‘Kurdistan rising: to acknowledge or ignore the unraveling of Iraq’, Middle East Memo No. 33 (Washington, DC:  The Brookings Institution, 2014). 3. The ‘first’ Republic of Kurdistan was founded in the Iranian Kurdish town of Mahabad in 1946 under the leadership of Qazi Mohammed. The Republic was quashed barely a year later, and Qazi Mohammed executed (William Eagleton, The Kurdish Republic of 1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963)). 4. Marina Ottaway and David Ottaway, ‘How the Kurds got their way’, Foreign Affairs (May/June 2014). 5. David Romano, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization, and Identity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michael Eppel, ‘Historical setting:  the roots of modern Kurdish nationalism’, in Ofra Bengio (ed.), Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014), pp. 37–62. 6. Richard Schofield, ‘Borders, regions, and time: defining the Iraqi territorial state’, in Reidar Visser and Gareth Stansfield (eds), An Iraq of its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy? (London: Hurst & Co, 2007), pp. 167–204. 7. David Romano and Mehmet Gurses (eds), Conflict, Democratization, and the Kurds in the Middle East:  Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 8. Gareth Stansfield, ‘Kurds, Persian nationalism, and Shi‘a rule:  surviving Persian dominant nationhood in Iran’, ibid., pp. 59–84. 9. Gareth Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan:  Political Development and Emergent Democracy (London:  RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Ofra Bengio, The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State Within a State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2012). 10. Majid Khadduri, Republican Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 11. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London:  I.B.Tauris, 1996), pp. 307–13. 12. Ibid. 13. Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan, p. 75. 14. Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk:  The Ethnopolitics of Conflict and Compromise (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Peter Bartu, ‘Wrestling with the integrity of a nation: the disputed internal boundaries in Iraq’, International Affairs 86/6 (2010), pp. 1329–43. 15. Nader Entessar, Kurdish Politics in the Middle East (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2010). 16. For an account of Barzani’s view of events in the 1970s, following his exile, see David Korn, ‘The last years of Mustafa Barzani’, Middle East Quarterly 1/2 (June 1994), pp. 13–27. 17. Stansfield, Iraqi Kurdistan. 18. Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair:  America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mohammed Ahmad, ‘From blueprint to genocide: an analysis of Iraq’s sequenced crimes of genocide committed against the Kurds of Iraq’, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2014. 19. Hamid al-Bayati, From Dictatorship to Democracy:  An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Khalil Osman, Sectarianism in Iraq:  The Making of State and Nation Since 1920 (London: Routledge, 2015). 20. There are few, if any, references that illustrate the development of the intellectual thinking towards subjects such as federalism, consociationalism, and power-sharing among Kurdish political elites during the 1990s, beyond the occasional press report. Luckily, I had the very good fortune of working alongside Kurdish political figures in the KDP and PUK during the late 1990s and, as a PhD student working on these issues, had many extended discussions with leading figures in both parties on these subjects. A figure of particular noteworthiness in terms of his interest in federalism and consociationalism and the possibilities for the application of a federal system to Iraq was the late Sami Abdul Rahman, who was then a senior figure in the KDP Political Bureau and was later the KRG (Erbil) Deputy Prime Minister. He was assassinated by an Al Qaeda attack on the KDP Erbil Branch headquarters in February 2004.

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THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KURDISTAN REGION 21. Mohammed Shareef, The United States, Iraq and the Kurds:  Shock, Awe and Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2014). 22. Denise Natali, The Kurdish Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in PostGulf War Iraq (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010). 23. Michael Gunter, The Kurds Ascending:  The Evolving Solution to the Kurdish Problem in Iraq (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 24. Zaid al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism have Undermined Democracy (London:  Yale University Press, 2014); Hamoudi, Negotiating in Civil Conflict. 25. Toby Dodge, Iraq: From War to New Authoritarianism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Stansfield, ‘Kurdistan rising’. 26. Raad Alkadiri, ‘Oil and the question of federalism in Iraq’, International Affairs 86/6 (2010), pp. 1315–28. 27. Bartu, ‘Wrestling with the integrity of a nation’. 28. International Crisis Group (ICG), ‘Oil for soil: toward a grand bargain on Iraq and the Kurds’, Middle East Report No. 80, 28 October 2008. 29. Gareth R. Stansfield, ‘The unravelling of the post-First World War state system? The Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the transformation of the Middle East’, International Affairs 89/2 (2013), pp. 259–82. 30. Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS:  Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015); Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

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11 Political Parties, Elections and the Transformation of Iraqi Politics Since 2003 Marc Lemieux and Shamiran Mako

The story of political party discourse in Iraq, previously one of struggle, coercion, fragmentation and banishment, has matured into one of coalition, co-optation and concession-making since 2003. While party elites, patronage, tribalism and coercion remain constant factors in Iraqi governance, the experience of three provincial and three national elections has witnessed the emergence of local forces that have in turn transformed the players and outcomes of unpredictable national elections. Iraqi politics has seen the emergence of several new parties, leaders and coalitions, most of these importantly arising out of local politics, which have in turn shaped national politics and parliamentary behaviour. Despite election results, parties have slowly but gradually coalesced to form governments of national unity each time, with cabinet ministries divvied up among parties in order to extend local interests into national patronage. This chapter explains the evolution, growth and behaviour of local and national Iraqi political parties since the American invasion. An examination of the conduct and impact of local and national elections on state– society relations will define the quality of Iraqi democracy. Election results at all state levels since 2005 are chronologically analysed to confirm the interplay, co-relation and dependence between local and national political parties based on concession-making practices. While 2005 voting 238

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politicised communal identities, the campaigns and results of 2010 polls centred on national reach and secular ‘Iraqiness’, while 2014 voting revealed a distancing from coalition platforms toward intra-communal contests. Party battles continue to swing between secular nationalism and religious or local identity. Despite years of civil war and political violence, political actors are shaping but also being shaped by the choices of the electorate. The chapter concludes that the principal ‘all politics is local’ applies no less to Iraq where winners of local elections have influenced national election campaigns. Without local political contests every four years, voters would lack a vital accountability mechanism for tempering party elites and transforming national policies.

Political Parties in Divided Societies The emergence and proliferation of political parties following authoritarian breakdown reflects an emerging public sphere that bridges the state and society. In divided societies – characterised as those exhibiting salient political cleavages as ‘persistent markers of political identity and bases for political mobilization’ and whereby ‘political claims are refracted through the lens of ethnic identity, and political conflict is synonymous with conflict among ethnocultural groups’,1 a key challenge is to devise an institutional design that can best mitigate ethnic tensions while accommodating group grievances. This requires the formulation of constitutional and institutional tools that promote inclusion and national consensus whereby citizens share a common national loyalty.2 Two dominant conflict regulation prescriptions are Arend Lijphart’s consociationalism and Donald Horowitz’s centripetalism as an alternative to consociationalism. These competing models of institutional engineering in emerging democracies focus on the capacity of the transitional state to facilitate conflict prevention strategies in deeply divided societies. For Lijphart, segmental cleavages can be moderated by adopting consociationalism and its four principles: a grand coalition; a mutual veto; proportionality; and segmental autonomy. 3 For Horowitz, grand coalitions will only intensify centrifugal tendencies and will always override broad-based cooperation incentives in deeply divided societies. Alternatively, centripetalism entails drawing power to the centre in order to minimise centrifugal politics and the polarisation 239

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of existing ethnic cleavages.4 It is characterised by the reduction of conflict through arrangements that advance policies that generate incentives for interethnic cooperation through electoral coalitions or preferential and territorial arrangements; encouraging alignment based on common interests rather than ethnicity; and lastly, reducing disparities between groups to mitigate the future eruption of conflict.5 These divergent strategies seek to countervail the proliferation of violent ethnic strife during the transition and post-conflict phase of statebuilding following regime collapse in divided societies. In the case of Iraq, political parties are a product of a mixed-consociational system devised post-2003 as a mechanism for managing, mitigating and consolidating divergent group claims within the state following authoritarian breakdown. As integral components of democratic consolidation, political parties serve two fundamental purposes: first, they serve a representative function by appealing and responding to societal interests in a given polity; second, they structure and institutionalise the political arena by recruiting political leaders and organising parliament and government.6 While a discussion about the merits of the consociational model is beyond the scope of this chapter, we observe that the architects of Iraq’s post-2003 order engaged in political engineering in the absence of institutional regulation that could foster, accommodate and promote institutional and political party reforms as the emergent state embarked on a path of democratisation.7 An analysis of major elections in Iraq demonstrates elite weakness to implement and accept institutional reforms, which has impeded inter-party and coalition concession making.

Contextualising the Origins of Iraqi Opposition Parties Post-2003 When the United States (US)-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) established the 25 member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) in July 2003 the potential for asserting a tyranny of the majority hung over Iraq’s first assembly, as represented by 14 of 25 members being Shi‘a (MERIP). This was further exacerbated by fact that the Sunni Arab community was woefully underrepresented; save for five people, three of whom were exiles and two tribal leaders, respected representatives were lacking.8 Exiles like Ayad 240

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Allawi, Ahmed Chalabi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari rose quickly to power at the expense of local and tribal forces side-lined by American-facilitated political designs. Along with the entrenched Kurdish leaders, exiles became the new power elite, all survivors of Ba‘thist state terror. Nine out of the 25 members were exiles.9 Old political party leaders and survivors of the Ba‘thist regime occupied most seats; many of the parties had been prohibited and their members exiled until the collapse of the state in 2003, including the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), founded in 1946, the Dawa Party (1958), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 1975, the Assyrian Democratic Movement (1979), the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), 1982 and the Iraqi Turkmen Front (1995), to name a few. The 1992 creation of the no-fly zone beyond the 36th parallel, which effectively created the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, facilitated the consolidation of Iraq’s opposition groups even prior to regime collapse in 2003. This territorial protection facilitated the creation of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), consisting of Iraqi expats and opposition groups led by Ahmed Chalabi (who would be instrumental in providing what is now considered inflated intelligence to American policymakers prior to the 2003 invasion) along with the Iraqi National Accord, established in 1990 and led by Ayad Allawi. In particular, two Iraqi opposition conferences, one held in Vienna in April of 1992 and the other on 27 October of the same year in Salahuddin in Iraqi Kurdistan representing various ethnic, religious, sectarian and secular affiliations, became the impetus for devising the structural and political plan for a post-Husayn transitional Iraq.10 Thus, unsurprisingly, the majority Shi‘a and minority groups, including the Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Yazidis, and Mandeans, who had been systematically targeted by the regime, supported the initial occupation. This was exemplified by the Visions of Freedom meeting and declaration11 that took place in the city of Nasiriyah (where a major battle had been won by coalition forces against Ba‘thist loyalists between 23–29 March 2003) on 15 April 2003 and was attended by 100 Iraqis from across the ethno-religious spectrum (less than a month into the invasion), concluding that: 1. Iraq must be democratic; 2. the future government of Iraq should not be based on communal identity; 241

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3. a future government should be organised as a democratic federal system, but on the basis of countrywide consultation; 4. the rule of law must be paramount; 5. that Iraq must be built on respect for diversity including respect for the role of women; 6. the meeting discusses the role of religion in state and society; 7. the meeting discused [sic] the principle that Iraqis must choose their leaders, not have them imposed from outside; 8. that political violence must be rejected, and that Iraqis must immediately organise themselves for the task of reconstruction at both the local and national levels; 9. that Iraqis and the coalition must work together to tackle the immediate issues of restoring security and basic services; 10. that the Ba‘th party must be dissolved and its effects on society must be eliminated; 11. that there should be an open dialogue with all national political groups to bring them into the process; 12. that the meeting condemns the looting that has taken place and the destruction of documents; 13. the Iraqi participation in the Nasiriyah meeting voted that there should be another meeting in 10 days in a location to be determined with additional Iraqi participants and to discuss procedures for developing an Iraqi interim authority. Although the advancement of vetted opposition groups was an indispensible component of George W. Bush’s National Security Plan12 American policy toward the removal of Saddam Husayn was a common theme throughout the 1990s under the Clinton administration, advocated by a narrow group of neoconservatives including key figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney and William Kristol. These people would later become architects of Bush’s foreign policy approach to dealing with perceived threats to American and international security under the doctrine of pre-emption.13 Furthermore, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 – the blueprint for regime change – specifically outlined the need to support vetted Iraqi opposition groups who were ‘committed to democratic values, to respect for human rights, to peaceful relations with Iraq’s neighbours, to 242

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maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity, and to fostering cooperation among democratic opponents of the Saddam Husayn regime’,14 with the understanding that these groups would fill the political vacuum and institute democratic reforms following the toppling of the Ba‘th regime. Thus the formation and proliferation of political parties following regime collapse in Iraq must be analysed within this contextual background in order better to frame the role and efficacy of political parties during formative elections. By analysing electoral behaviour of political parties in Iraq since 2005, we observe that ethnic political parties are a symptomatic outcome of both the struggle of Iraq’s ethnic elites under autocratic single-party rule as well as the emergence of a fledgling public sphere that is seeking to consolidate group-based demands in a highly unpredictable and volatile democratising political order.

Expedient Statebuilding and Elections in 2005 Given the pliant nature of IGC members to CPA policies, the Council acquiesced to American designs to engineer a top-down caucus selection process for anointing 100 members of a constituent assembly for drafting a new constitution. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani protested by religious decree (fatwa) at the idea of unelected Iraqis writing the document. He pushed for elections, while the Sunni Arab insurgency continued to grow at the expense of Washington’s patience. It proved not to be a very democratic start. In the wake of the failed 15 November agreement between the CPA and IGC a rescue plan evolved under the previously ostracised United Nations (UN) mission and its new envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, replacing the late Sergio Vieira de Mello who, along with 21 other foreign nationals, died in an August Al Qaeda suicide attack on UN headquarters. Before his death, de Mello’s efforts to facilitate local council elections had been rebuffed by the CPA, many of these already haphazardly taking place under US military commanders. During early 2004 Brahimi toured the country, met hundreds of senior influential community, tribal and religious leaders and ultimately secured a national political roadmap. Elections were deemed feasible within eight months of a decreed election law and the installation of a publicly nominated election commission vetted by the CPA, IGC and 243

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UN. By May an electoral law, political party law and election commission were in place. By June an interim government of mostly exile technocrats had been named, headed by the secularist Ayad Allawi. Despite rising violence and the Sunni Arab boycott, Iraq’s first genuine elections took place on 30 January 2005, garnering a 58.9 per cent turnout, including registered diaspora Iraqis voting in 14 countries. Given a lack of time, CPA and UN organisers agreed in favour of a simple voting formula, the single district proportional representation (PR) closed-list system in which all voters nationwide received the same ballot. There were 275 parliamentary seats to fill in the Council of Representatives (COR). The same day saw additional ballots for electing councillors to each of the 18 provincial governments. In the three Kurdish provinces, voters received a third ballot in order to elect members to the Kurdistan National Parliament (KNA), founded in May 1992. The pan-Shi‘a United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) ticket, uniting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Dawa, Fadhila and other Shi‘a Islamists and independents, won 140 national seats or 48.2 per cent of seats. Other Council of Representatives members included the Kurdish Alliance (KDP, PUK, Kurdish Communists, Turkmen, KIU)  – 75 or 25.7 per cent; Iraqiyah List (Allawi) – 40 or 13.8 per cent; Iraqis (Ghazi Yawar, interim president) – 5; Turkmen Iraqi Front (funded by Ankara) – 3; Elites and Cadres (a Sadrist faction)  – 3; Kurdistan Islamic Group  – 2; Communists  – 2.  Four seats were also allocated to four other parties including one to the NDP.15 Sadrists boycotted and demonstrated against any polls taking place under occupation. After five months of backroom negotiations and concession-making involving provincial council tradeoffs versus ministerial posts, a prime minister from the Islamic Dawa Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was named in May in order to form Iraq’s constituent assembly. Dawa presented little threat to its militia-armed Shi‘a rivals, especially the SCIRI-allied Badr Brigades. During the 2004 campaign alJaafari had polled as Iraq’s most popular politician. At the provincial level SCIRI scored highest in five of the nine southern Shi‘a-dominated provinces and had reached accord for appointing six of the nine governors, including Baghdad.16 Despite a mass Sunni Arab boycott, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) Diyala office chose to ignore the party’s official withdrawal and secured 14 seats in Diyala and 34 of 41 244

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seats in Anbar.17 By boycotting polls, Sunni Arabs consequently failed to be adequately represented in real numbers on the governorate councils of multicultural provinces like Ninewa, Kirkuk, Diyala and Baghdad, the first two of which were disproportionately run by Kurds. In 2007, as a means of reconciliation, eight tribal seats were added to the Anbar council to recognise the Sahwa.18 The reverberating effects of the January Sunni Arab boycott gravely exaggerated the distribution of other winning parties and elites over and above their warranted national demographics. Seats only reflected voters, not the eligible electorate. Sunni Arab representation in the Baghdad parliament was relegated to under 8 per cent of 275 seats19 instead of the allotted 18–20 per cent. This warped electoral calculus was avoided in December 2005 voting by a new election law reserving fixed seats per province based on demographic estimates and using a multi-member proportional representation closed-list system. Each province distributed different ballots. The 15 December 2005 national polls witnessed the campaigns of 19 party coalitions, culminating in voter participation at 79.6 per cent, with the highest turnout rates still in Kurdish and Shi‘a areas. The 278 seats20 were filled as follows: UIA (including Sadrists) – 128 seats or 41.2 per cent; KA – 53 seats or 21.7 per cent; Tawafuq coalition (including IIP) – 44 seats or 15.1 per cent; Allawi’s Iraqiyah List (including Communists and Yawar’s Iraqis) – 25 seats or 8 per cent; Saleh al-Mutlaq’s Hiwar – 11 seats or 4.1 per cent; KIU – 5 seats or 1.3 per cent. Others accounted for the remaining 11 seats, including three for the Juburi tribe.21 By May, and at the insistence of Sadrist support, a government of national unity was formed under the leadership of another Dawa Party leader Nouri al-Maliki, previously the exiled Dawa representative in Damascus. The grassroots local reach of previously disenfranchised Sadrists challenged the hold of exile elites. Sadrist control of the health ministry reflected their charitable cause, not to mention their access to patronage.

Domestic Security Threats and Cross-Party Concessions Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took full advantage of the post-election government vacuum during a seemingly eternal five-month government formation period. On 22 February 2006, in a strategy that divided Muslim 245

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communities by stoking sectarian tensions, AQI blew up the Shi‘a al-Askari shrine in Samara, sparking unprecedented Mahdi militia acts of revenge on Sunni-Arab communities. However, three politico-military developments within a year saved Iraq, at least in the short term, from the brink of irreversible fragmentation – the Anbar awakening (or Anbar Sahwa Councils), resulting in tribal realignment against AQI in September 2006; the January 2007 18-month surge of 30,000 US troops; and Muqtada al-Sadr’s August 2007 announcement of a ceasefire and disbandment of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia group. On the parliamentary front, inter-party concession-making revealed itself in October 2006 with the trade-off decision between Shi‘a and Sunni parliamentarians to simultaneously pass the Creation of Regions bill while also establishing the Constitutional Review Committee process (CRC). The ISCI had made election promises for creating a nine-province pan-Shi‘a region with Kurdish-style autonomy22 while Sunni Arabs, as promised by Article 142, secured an opportunity to improve the 2005 constitution. Both developments came with a relatively impressive but incomplete CRC bill, shelved once deposited to parliament in May 2007. In early 2008, parliament also inaugurated a new national post-Saddam flag. More importantly, the government of national unity under al-Maliki succeeded in passing three conciliatory bills: a prison amnesty for hundreds of Sunni political prisoners; a national budget entitling Kurds to their 17 per cent cut; and a Provincial Powers Law, which in reality only weakened the constitutional rights of provincial councils to make appointments and manage budgets, security and resources,23 convenient for ISCI-dominated central government ministries and their provincial councils. Likewise, in the lead up to the 2009 provincial election, Iraq’s military and political balance of power began to shift and to pay political dividends on three levels. First, the Anbar awakening and subsequent tribal-American partnership against AQI resulted in concerted local participation in the political process during the January 2009 provincial elections. After the Sunni Arabs’ regretted 2005 boycott, their political sands began to shift. By 2008 the Al-Hadba coalition had united a dozen Ninewa political groups24 and received strong support from several Arab and Kurdish tribes, including the Shammar tribe, one of Iraq’s largest tribes and, like many, imbued with Sunni and Shi‘a clans and houses. During the January 2005 national elections, Osama al-Nujaifi of Mosul had been elected on the secularist 246

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nationalist Allawi ticket, serving as Industry Minister under Dawa Party leader and Prime Minister al-Jaafari until May 2006. Second, the political success of al-Maliki’s military gamble to deploy the Iraqi Army hastily against criminal and unruly elements in Basra during his (US-salvaged) Charge of the Knights operation heightened his confidence enough to enable him to ignore Tehran’s pleas for continued sectarian politics.25 Lastly, given the impact of religious-inspired election violence in 2005, the secular-leaning Election Law of 2009 banned the use of religious symbols in campaign materials, a reaction to earlier abuse by SCIRI/ISCI and the Sadrists usage of poster images of Ayatollahs Sistani and al-Hakim, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s martyred father and uncle.26 The 2009 local elections saw polling in 14 provinces, reaching a low 51 per cent turnout. The Kurds refused either to allow voting rights in Kirkuk or to permit its own provincial councils to be re-elected (until April 2014). None of the incumbents from the 2005 provincial elections maintained their popular support, a clear indication of public dissatisfaction regarding failed levels of community service and disgust at a culture of corrupt, self-serving party elites. The biggest winner overall was strongman Prime Minister al-Maliki’s new State of Law (SOL) coalition, gaining the largest votes in nine of the 14 provinces, including 38 per cent in Baghdad and 37 per cent in Basra. Iraqiyah came in second in Salah Adin province, home to Saddam’s Al Tikriti tribe. ISCI averaged a miserable 10 per cent support in the southern provinces, and dropped to 5 per cent from 39 per cent support in Baghdad.27 The Basra-based Fadhila Party, an Islamist splinter from the Sadrist movement, was also trounced.28 Ninewa province’s new Al-Hadba coalition garnered almost 50 of the vote and took over the provincial council from KDP domination since 2005, leading to a KRG-driven boycott of local politics for several years. Aside from Al-Hadba, none of the big 2009 winners used the word ‘Arab’ to identify their nationalism. Sunni Arabs had not thought of themselves as Sunni Arabs, never considering themselves in a sectarian cloak.29 Several parties and coalitions in 2005 included the word ‘national’ in their name including the Dawa offshoot of former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the National Reform Trend. Sunni Arab leader Salih al-Mutlaq and his Hiwar coalition took the highest number of votes in Anbar, as well as third place in both Diyala and Salah Adin provinces. The second highest percentage of support in Anbar 247

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predictably went to the US-sponsored Sahwa or Awakening Councils, a coalition of tribes. Tribal power had come a long way, having been sidelined by both the CPA and the Shi‘a exiled elite in 2003. The IIP in Anbar formed a coalition with the Intellectuals and Tribes coalition party, coming in third. Tawafuq had long suspected that the political rise of Sahwa councils would be at their expense.30 Proponents of regionalisation and religious allegiance, as lead by ISCI, suffered popular dissatisfaction as a result of failed leadership and of their continued joint agenda with the Kurds to weaken the state and parliament via laws such as the Creation of Regions bill.31 Al-Maliki campaigned hard against this kind of disempowered central governance, a policy that would not only lead to his gradual reversal of parliamentary prerogatives, but to the illegal dismantling of federal constitutional powers by all means, including the direct appointment of provincial administrators and security commanders by central ministries, and reduced budget transfers to provinces and eventually to Kurdistan. Local forces had to mobilise to assert their rights.

Societal Responses to the State: Coalition Campaigns in 2010 The 2010 electoral campaigns attempted to deviate from the overt ethnoreligious and sectarian tendencies of preceding elections, as observed in the campaigns of al-Maliki and Allawi, both of which advanced national, interethnic and even secular ideals in order to maximise nation-wide voter attractiveness. As noted by Dawisha: ‘The most glaring element of the campaign was the near-absence of the three topics that had dominated Iraq’s political landscape for years – federalism, the occupation, and religion.’32 Moreover, new parties and coalitions emerged to compete at the national level, including Kurdistan’s Gorran movement, running in 10 provinces and outside their KRG base. The improved open-list election law even enabled candidates within large coalitions to directly address and attract voters, which benefitted Sadrist candidates within the renamed UIA or Iraqi National Alliance (INA) headed by ISCI leader Ammar al-Hakim. It also advanced the support base of an additional 21 of the 82 female candidates, who earned their seats outright.33 Al-Maliki’s State of Law (SOL) coalition was 248

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composed of 35 political entities, while Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement (INM) included 18 groups and parties like IIP, Al-Hadba and Al-Mutlaq’s Hiwar, as well as prominent Sunni-Arab figures like Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi (IIP) and parliamentary speaker Osama al-Nujaifi (al-Hadba leader).34 While key candidates attempted to cut across ethnic fault lines, the cochair of the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC), formerly the de-Ba‘thification Commission, Ahmed Chalabi, sought to minimise party and electoral competition by barring 511 primarily secular and Sunni-Arab candidates, previously approved by Iraq’s electoral commission (IHEC), from participating two months prior to the 2010 elections. Consequently, the politicised AJC neutralised the participation of Chalabi’s very competition, namely 72 INM candidates and 67 candidates from Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani’s secular coalition, the Unity Alliance of Iraq.35 The reluctant glorification of divisive politicking surfaced when al-Maliki himself reversed a timely and prudent court decision to postpone the AJC decision until after the polls, thus breaching the divisions of power enshrined in the constitution by interfering in judicial independence.36 The ban against al-Mutlaq would later be reversed. Incongruities in Iraq’s institutional landscape would continue to impede the electoral process as incumbents and candidates interfered in the application of the country’s electoral laws and constitutional principles. Societal discontent with incumbents was reflected in the March 2010 election results where voters decisively sought to reconstitute Baghdad’s national assembly by re-electing only 62 of the 275 incumbents to their seats, with a 62.4 per cent electoral participation rate.37 The election results also handed victory to Allawi’s INM or Iraqiya, which secured 91 seats (including 12 in Southern Shi‘a provinces) and 24.7 per cent of total votes cast. Al-Maliki’s SOL coalition took 89 seats and 24.2 per cent, followed by the INA, headed by al-Hakim, al-Sadr, Jaafari and Chalabi, which earned 70 seats and 18.2 per cent (of which Sadrists took 39 seats), the Kurdistan Alliance won 43 seats and 14.6 per cent with Gorran (running in 10 provinces) winning eight seats, the Tawafuq coalition taking six seats, and four seats going to the KIU.38 To Allawi’s advantage, and as a reflection of the loss of its social base, Tawafuq’s Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) lost 90 per cent of its support base between 2005 and 2010.39 Despite al-Maliki’s demand for a Baghdad 249

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city recount and a court challenge of suspected Ba‘thist candidates, the results were deemed legitimate by international and UN monitors. Nevertheless, al-Maliki’s refusal to accept electoral defeat and a new incumbent government affected the credibility of Iraq’s fledgling electoral system as various foreign powers sought to influence the electoral process and results. Specifically, American and Iranian interests aligned to ultimately support the return of an al-Maliki government,40 whereas Turkey had publicly backed secularist Allawi. Turkey’s stance caused the rapid deterioration of al-Maliki’s relations with Ankara and the unprecedented acceleration of rapprochement and official economic and political agreements between the KRG and Turkey, especially following President Talabani’s historic visit to Ankara in 2011. Following months of negotiations over a unity government, al-Maliki managed to assemble a government of national unity in November consisting of ministers assigned to various ethno-religious factions that maintained the short-sighted muhasasa system of ethnicbased proportional representation. Ethnic tensions were manifested in the exclusive ethnic elite bargaining system41 as Jalal Talabani, a president without institutionalised veto powers, refused President Obama’s overtures to offer his presidency to Allawi, noting that a Kurd should not have to pay for a problem between Sunni and Shi‘a Arabs.42 The speaker of parliament, a post more powerful than the president’s, went to Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni-Arab from the al-Hadba coalition in Ninewah. Ethno-religious elite bargaining within Iraq’s consociational model was put to the test in the 2010 election as political parties became increasingly dichotomised between those advocating Iraqi nationalism versus those seeking to bolster their communal base as reflected in the Kurdish, Shi‘a and Sunni blocs.

Electoral and Societal Responses to Centralisation and Re-Emergent Authoritarianism Following the formation of a government of national unity in 2010 al-Maliki actively sought to restore a more centralised government in Baghdad, supported by allies in the military, the judicial system and some provincial councils, despite a seemingly weak initial national mandate. Although a January 2013 parliamentary bill approved limiting the posts of the prime minister, president and parliamentary speaker to two terms, 250

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the Federal Supreme Court overruled that bill in August 2013 as unconstitutional because it was only a draft law from parliament, and not one originating from the Council of Ministers, as per a new 2011 court ruling by the same Chief Justice.43 Parliament, however, succeeded in blocking al-Maliki’s earlier attempt to corrupt the IHEC by appointing six of its ninemember panel.44 Unsurprisingly, local party leaders, public protesters and tribal coalitions continued to express their discontent toward al-Maliki’s centralisation programmes during the April 2013 provincial elections, as exemplified by the 23 April protest in Hawija, south of Kirkuk, which resulted in the death of over 50 purportedly unarmed Sunni-Arabs by Iraqi troops45 and injured over 110 more.46 Despite a modest 51 per cent voter turnout, as in 2009 (but barely 35 per cent participation in Ninewa, Anbar and Baghdad), the 2013 provincial campaigns witnessed unprecedented degrees of street marches inspired by uprisings that had shaken that Arab region two years before. Ignoring Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) death threats to voters and candidates, claiming that elections are un-Islamic, campaigns in 2013 focused domestically on the economy, cabinet corruption, poor electricity, water and sewage services, rather than on security or foreigner intervention.47 Growing societal discontent with domestic disparity shifted voter attention to critical issues relating to the basic provision of goods and services above broader regional and international concerns. By mid-May 2013, the IHEC reported that al-Maliki’s State of Law (SOL) support fell by a third to 102 seats from a 154 provincial seats in the 2009 election, although it won the most seats in eight of the southern provinces including Baghdad. Ammar al-Hakim’s Citizens Alliance gained a total of 66 seats while coming in second in seven provinces. Muqtada al-Sadr’s coalition won a total of 60 seats including most seats in Maysan, while placing third in other southern provinces. Parliamentary speaker al-Nujaifi’s new Mutahidun or Uniters coalition gathered 35 seats nationally, while Deputy Prime Minister alMutlaq’s Arab Iraqiyah party won 18 seats. Similarly, voter dissatisfaction with governing elites across the provinces and regions was observable in the electoral results where 12 of the 14 provinces elected new governors, with the exception of Ninewa and Salahadin.48 The anti-al-Maliki political spectrum evolved with the morphing of new coalitions, especially in Ninewa, Anbar, Najaf, Salahadin, Diyala 251

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and Baghdad. The dwindling support for secular coalitions of Iraqiyah49 and Tawafuq50 fell considerably due to splinters in favour of Mutahidun, whose list came in first in Anbar and second in Baghdad,51 al-Maliki’s SOL gained the most seats in Baghdad’s council, small parties gathered around the seven seats of Mutahidun and those of al-Sadr to agree on a Sadrist governor and Mutahidun council chair, causing al-Maliki’s members to storm out of the meeting.52 In Ninwa, the president of the council was a Kurd from KDP, while his vice-president was a Turkmen from Mutahidun, while the governor’s two deputies were a Kurd and Arab.53 However, a confluence of factors contributed to low voter turnout and electoral results in Ninewa province, including but not limited to growing political apathy and a stagnating urban security environment, all of which contributed to the fall of its major city, Mosul, to ISIS in June of 2014. Although the interethnic mosaic of the city was demonstrated by the estimated 36 seats won by councillors from outside Mosul, including 11 seats for Kurds and Yazidi and six seats for Turkmen, Shabak, and Assyrian Christians, the fragility of Mosul’s mosaic became evident with the collapse of the city to ISIS, which fuelled inter-ethnic violence. While for the first time ever national coalition winners of 2005 and 2010 elections decided against teaming up on joint tickets, the choices available to 2014 voters only modestly changed because the same elites of 2010 simply decided not to run together. Kurds, Sunnis and Shi‘a each had at least three options available, in addition to the continued open-list personal candidate. The provincial election results materialised when successful parties placed their winning governors at the front of PUK campaigns in Kirkuk and ISCI campaigns in Basra.54 On 30 April, despite a low 52 per cent voter turnout, Sadrist supporters competed for the Shi‘a vote. Having managed to co-opt Badr candidates (as in 2010), al-Maliki barely increased SOL’s 2010 count by 5 seats. On the Kurdish front, unlike in 1992, 2005 and 2010, Kurdish voters were no longer restricted to the usual KDP-PUK alliance, with voters looking to Gorran, KIU and KIG as alternatives. Sunni Arab voters chose between al-Nujaifi’s Mutahidun, Mutlaq’s Arabiyah and Allawi’s Wataniyah (Iraqiyah). Forty-eight seats were reserved for smaller parties, with eight seats allotted to Iraq’s smaller minorities such as Turkmen, Assyrians, Yazidis and Shabaks.55 Nevertheless, the 2014 elections reproduced the pattern of electing ruling elites and incumbents who 252

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sought to consolidate their ethnic base, while those seeking interethnic support received marginal votes, with al-Maliki securing 96 seats (19 seats for Badr candidates), Sadrists 34, al-Hakim 31, al-Nujaifi 28, Barzani 25 (six seats from Ninewa), Allawi 21, Talabani 21 (six seats from Kirkuk), al-Mutlaq 10, Mustafa nine.56 As in 2012, in the failed attempt to hold a parliamentary vote of no confidence in Prime Minister al-Maliki, the 2014 opposition to al-Maliki proved politically insufficient to unseat SOL from its traditional stronghold in Baghdad (30 seats) and the Shi‘a south.

Post-Election Elite Bargaining in the Context of ISIS Given the sudden and humiliating loss of one-third of Iraq’s territory to ISIS forces in June 2014, al-Maliki’s grip on power was shattered by calls for his resignation amid an almost territorial and political breakdown of the country. Faced with growing foreign pressure from both Washington and regional states, an escalating humanitarian crisis resulting from a surge in refugees and internally displaced persons, and the growing vulnerability of one of Iraq’s best trained security forces, the peshmerga (which quickly moved in to secure Kurdish-strategic areas in the disputed territories, including Kirkuk and its oil fields), elites from his SOL coalition and Iraq’s top Shi‘a cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, along with elites from across Iraq’s ethno-religious spectrum, called for al-Maliki’s resignation following ISIS’s takeover of swaths of territory across Iraq.57 ISIS’s advancement into Iraq in June of 2014 tested the fragility of Iraq’s political and territorial viability but also its elite bargaining and party and parliamentary cohesion. By 15 July a parliamentary speaker was voted in by a comfortable 194 parliamentary votes, securing the mandate of Sunni Arab Salim al-Jibburi, a Diyala member from the Iraqi Islamic Party under al-Nujaifi’s coalition. By 24 July a new president, the veteran PUK politician and former Kurdish Prime Minister Fouad Masoum, was sworn in by the Supreme Court, having received the support of 211 of 269 votes in the Iraqi parliament.58 Although al-Maliki and his SOL coalition secured a parliamentary victory in the April 2014 elections, ethno-religious elites from Iraq’s diverse parties and coalitions called for his resignation as a contentious and divisive figure who, while not single-handedly creating Iraq’s political stalemate, had nevertheless exacerbated tensions between Iraq’s Shi‘as, 253

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Sunnis, and Kurds.59 Unsurprisingly, on 11 August President Masoum chose Haider al-Abadi as a conciliatory prime minister from the Dawa Party to replace al-Maliki, who reluctantly conceded defeat. By 9 September, and following his approval by 177 members of parliament, Prime Minister alAbadi declared his choice of cabinet posts (Council of Ministers) in Iraq’s third post-2003 government of national unity, with the usual divvying up of ministerial posts to inter-ethnic parties and coalitions.60 Al-Abadi made swift symbolic political concessions by appointing Nouri al-Maliki (Shi‘a Arab), Ayad Allawi (secular Shi‘a Arab) and Usama al-Nujayfi (Sunni Arab) to the otherwise powerless post of vice-presidents.61 While tackling what is arguably one of the most prudent challenges to Iraq’s domestic stability and security, al-Abadi’s government has since pronounced various reforms to Iraq’s socio-economic and political structures by fostering federalism, decentralisation and reform of the armed forces, including the appointment of a new Minister of Defense from Mosul, and the formation of a decentralised, ethnically diverse National Guard across Iraq’s provinces and regions.62

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates the complex processes that govern electoral rules, political concessions and political party dynamics in post-2003 Iraq. By analysing Iraq’s electoral results following major federal and provincial elections, we observe that while political parties (both ethnic and noncommunal) have operated within the country’s electoral playfield, postelection coalition building and concession making among major parties remains a fragile and highly unpredictable affair. Traditions of patronage, tribalism, ethnic and religious differences and coercion continue to accompany co-optation and concession-making exercises. The institutionalisation of a ‘patronage democracy’ impedes the formation of cross-cultural political parties and coalitions as individuals look inwardly toward their co-ethnic elites, not necessarily out of a common communal bond, but to bolster their socio-economic position in a highly fragmented political arena.63 Moreover, although al-Maliki’s polarising and authoritarian governing pattern during his tenure created major political setbacks to national 254

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reconciliation between Iraq’s various ethno-religious factions, the intransigence of Sunni Arab political leadership and their reluctance to accept the shift in the state’s identity post-2003 by actively participating within the given political order has been equally damaging to Iraq’s political development.64 This gravely affected the capacity of the state to build a new social contract predicated on mending and binding state–society relations following authoritarian breakdown. Nevertheless, the government formation process remains an entirely unique expression of Iraqi democracy in action. New parties and political leaders continue to emerge, gradually, especially at the grassroots local level, as demonstrated in national and provincial polls with open list PR systems even in the absence of effective and democratic intraparty elite leadership contests. The holding of local elections before national polls gives the advantage of preparing political and social forces for choice, citizen empowerment and mobilisation. These local contests force national party leaders to remain at least minimally accountable. After all, al-Maliki’s resignation in 2014 marked the first time in Iraq’s political history where an Iraqi leader willingly, and without resorting to violence, conceded power to a rival without a coup d’état. Avoiding further democratic breakdown requires strengthening constitutional ambiguities, including parliamentary and executive operating procedures, PM term limits, the depoliticisation of judicial appointments, the de-ethnification of the state’s security apparatuses and national judicial reform. This must also complement a concerted effort to foster national reconciliation among Iraq’s diverse ethno-religious communities as but one marker of state–society interactions.

Notes 1. Sujit Choudry, ‘Bridging comparative politics and comparative constitutional law: constitutional design in divided society’, in Sujit Choudry (ed.), Constitutional Design for Divided Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3–40, 5. 2. Nicholas R.L. Haysom, ‘Consitution making and nation building’, in Raoul Blindenbacher and Arnold Koller (eds), Federalism in a Changing World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), pp. 216–39, 217.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 3. Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 118–19. In later works Lijphart outlines nine constitutional guidelines for consociationalism: legislative electoral system; guidelines within proportional representation; parliamentary or presidential government; power-sharing in the executive; cabinet stability; selecting the head of state; nonterritorial autonomy; and power-sharing beyond the cabinet and parliament. See Arend Lijphart, ‘Constitutional design for divided societies,’ Journal of Democracy 15/2 (April 2004), pp. 99–105. 4. Donald L. Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1991), pp. 181–90. 5. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1985), pp. 597–9. 6. Matthijs Bogaards, ‘Comparative strategies of political party regulation’, in Benjamin Reilly and Per Nordlund (eds), Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2008), pp. 48–66, 49. 7. Benjamin Reilly, ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp. 3–24, 6. 8. Sharon Otterman, ‘Iraq’s Governing Council’, Council on Foreign Relations, 17 May 2004. 9. Ibid. 10. Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 53–63. 11. US Department of State, ‘Visions of Freedom: 100 Iraqis Meet in Nasiriyah and Create Basis for New Government,’ 15 April 2003. Available at: http://2001– 2009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/19714.htm. 12. White House, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’ September 2002. Available at:  http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/ 63562.pdf. 13. John Dumbrell, ‘Bush’s war: the Iraq conflict and American democracy’, in Alex Danchev and John MacMillan (eds), Iraq War and Democratic Politics (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), pp. 33–44, 38. 14. Iraq Watch, “Iraq Liberation Act” 1998. Available at:  http://www.iraqwatch. org/government/US/Legislation/ILA.htm. 15. Faleh A. Jabar, ‘Ethnic and communal identities in the Iraqi first post-conflict general elections: the difficult search for centrism’, in La problématique de la démocratie consensuelle dans les sociétés multiculturelles: Liban et Irak (Beirut: Lebanese Center for Political Studies, 2007), p. 157; Toby Dodge, Iraq: From War to New Authoritarianism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 215; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 5th edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), p. 386. 16. International Crisis Group (ICG), ‘Iraq’s provincial elections:  the stakes’, Report 82, 27 January 2009, p. 15. 17. Ibid., p. 4.

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POLITICAL PARTIES, ELECTIONS AND TRANSFORMATION 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City:  Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 297. 20. Forty-five compensatory national seats were included, thus encouraging parties to reach across provinces, and compensating a party with national support but unable within one province to reach a minimum threshold of votes. 21. Dodge, Iraq, p. 216; Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, p. 386. 22. SCIRI and the Kurds had developed relations during the Iran–Iraq War which brought the Shi‘a closer to Kurdish views including on federalism (Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 45). 23. Zaid al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism have Undermined Democracy (London:  Yale University Press, 2014), p. 142. 24. Consisting of United Mosul Coalition, Iraqi Centrist Coalition, Iraqi Kurdistan Justice and Freedom Party, Democratic Shabak Gathering, Socialist Arab Stream Movement, Tal Afar People’s Coalition, Pan-Arab and National Forces Coalition in Ninewa, Movement of Justice and Reform in Iraq Political Council of National Forces, many independents (Mariam Aziz, ‘Ninawa’s new political competitor’, Niqash, 30 July 2009). 25. Along with his Dawa party (Tanzim al-Iraq), Islamic Dawa and other factions like Basra-based Fadilah, Basra-based Badr, the Independents Party (led by his Oil Minister Hussein al-Sharistani), al-Maliki created the largely Shi‘a State of Law coalition, thus cultivating the image of a strongman able to protect his flock. 26. Stephen Farrell, ‘Election: preliminary results’, New York Times, 5 February 2009. 27. Reidar Visser, ‘No longer supreme:  after local elections, ISCI becomes a 10 percent party south of Baghdad’, Historiae.org, 5 February 2009. Available at http://www.historiae.org/ISCI.asp. 28. Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, p. 123. 29. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 136. 30. Myriam Benraad, ‘Iraq’s tribal “sahwa”:  its rise and fall,’ Middle East Policy Council 18/1 (Spring 2011), pp. 121–31; citing Brian Katulis, Peter Juul and Ian Moss, ‘Awakening to new dangers in Iraq: Sunni “allies” pose an emerging threat’, Center for American Progress, 7 February 2008. 31. Marc Lemieux, ‘Iraq’s 2009 provincial and regional elections:  the dynamics of political identity since 2005’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4/1–2 (2010), pp. 211–17. 32. Adeed Dawisha, ‘Iraq: a vote against sectarianism’, Journal of Democracy 21/3 (July 2010), pp. 26–40, 33. 33. Ibid., p. 38. 34. Ibid., p. 30.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 35. Suadad Al-Salhy, ‘Iraq List of Excluded Candidates has More Shi‘ites’, Washington Post, 20 January 2010. 36. Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, p. 133. 37. Dawisha, ‘Iraq’, p. 27. 38. Dodge, Iraq. 39. Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, p. 124. 40. Ali Khedery, ‘Why we stuck with Maliki – and lost’, Washington Post, 3 July 2014. 41. Dodge, Iraq, p. 40. 42. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), p. 647. 43. Ali Adel Sabdah, ‘Maliki to run for third term following court decision’, Al-Monitor, 3 September 2013. Article 72 of the constitution already limits the President to two terms. Article 60 does not clarify the difference between a proposed law (from al-Maliki’s cabinet) and a draft law from parliament. 44. Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, p. 147. 45. Ibid., p. 141. 46. International Crisis Group, ‘Make or break: Iraq’s Sunnis and the state’, Report 144, 14 August 2013, p. ii. 47. Michael Hoffman, ‘Arab Barometer Iraq Country Report,’ July 2012. Available at: http://www.arabbarometer.org/country/iraq. 48. Reidar Visser, ‘Final results of the Iraq provincial elections’, Gulf Analysis, 4 May 2013; ‘The intra-list structure of the State of Law Alliance in Iraq’s new provincial councils’, Gulf Analysis, 7 May 2013; ‘12 Iraqi provinces have new governors,’ Gulf Analysis, 20 June 2013. 49. Allawi failed to build bridges and harness parliamentarians into a broad base, partially a result of his poor parliamentary attendance record (ICG, no. 127). Nine of his members would splinter over to al-Maliki’s side as of 2011 (ICG no. 44: 10). 50. Tawafuq was previously lead by the now-exiled Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi who, almost immediately following the departure of US troops in 2011, was charged with murder and sentenced to death in 2012 in absentia by a pro-al-Maliki central court. 51. Visser, ‘The intra-list structure of the State of Law Alliance’; ‘12 Iraqi provinces have new governors’, Gulf Analysis, 9 May 2013. Available at:  https:// gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/ 2013/ 05/ 09/ patterns- of- electoral- behaviourin- iraq- the- use- of- the- personal- vote- in- the- april- 2013- provincialelections/. 52. Xinhua, ‘Baghdad Provincial Council elects new leaders, as Iraqi PM’s loyalists walk out’, 15 June 2013. Available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/ world/2013-06/15/c_132457676.htm.

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POLITICAL PARTIES, ELECTIONS AND TRANSFORMATION 53. Abdullah Salem, ‘Voter’s revolution in Ninawa: local minorities take over provincial government’, Niqash, 22 August 2013. 54. Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, p. 11. 55. Reidar Visser, ‘The Iraqi parliament approves the Abbadi cabinet’, Gulf Analysis, 9 September 2014. 56. Ibid.; Institute for the Study of War (ISW), ‘Final 2014 Iraqi National elections results by major political groups’, 19 May 2014. Available at http://iswresearch. blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/final-2014-iraqi-national-elections.html. 57. Loveday Morris and Karen DeYoung, ‘Maliki steps aside, easing Iraq’s political crisis’, Washington Post, 14 August 2014. 58. Loveday Morris, ‘Veteran Kurdish politician elected president of Iraq’, Washington Post, 24 July 2014. 59. T. Shireen Hunter, ‘The real causes of Iraq’s problems’, LobeLog, 14 June 2014. Available at https://lobelog.com/2014-06-the-real-causes-of-iraqs-problems/; Haddad, 2014. 60. While former prime minister Jaafari became Foreign Minister, and former top diplomat Hoshyar Zebari took over finance, former Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi took over the Oil Ministry (Musings on Iraq, ‘PUK makes comeback in Kurdish provincial elections, but with charges of fraud’, 28 May 2014. Available at http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/puk-makes-comeback-in-kurdish. html). 61. Reidar Visser, ‘The Iraq elections result:  Maliki’s complicated win’, Gulf Analysis, 19 May 2014. 62. H. Muhamed Almaliky, ‘Mending Iraq’, Foreign Affairs, 16 January 2015. 63. Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 11. 64. Fanar Haddad, ‘Getting rid of Maliki won’t solve Iraq’s Crisis’, Washington Post, 17 June 2014, pp. 5–6; ‘A sectarian awakening: the reinvention of Sunni identity after 2003’, Singapore Middle East Institute, 24 September 2014.

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12 The Road to the ‘Islamic State’: State–Society Relations after the US Withdrawal from Iraq Benjamin Isakhan

When the final US troops withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011 two interconnected things were obvious to even the most casual observer. Firstly, the enormous US-led effort to convert Iraq from a quasi-socialist dictatorship into a liberal democracy underpinned by a free-market economy had been an abject failure. Secondly, the Iraqi political elite of all different sects and ethnicities had failed to weave a coherent political narrative that spoke to a united and prosperous future. In other words, they had failed to manage Iraq’s state–society relations; to build a bridge between the new Iraqi government and the complex, diverse and fragile cultural and political mosaic that constitute the broader Iraqi society.1 This is nowhere more obvious than in the increasingly fractured and tense relationship between the Shi‘a Arab dominated government and the Sunni Arab minority of central and western Iraq. The Sunni Arabs (roughly 20 per cent of the Iraqi population) had held the reigns of political power in the modern nation state of Iraq since its creation by the British at the end of World War I. The Shi‘a Arabs (roughly 60 per cent) had been routinely marginalised and often actively persecuted by the Sunni Arab state, especially under the Ba‘th party of Saddam Husayn. The toppling of Saddam’s regime by the US-led intervention of 2003 dramatically changed this sectarian power balance, with the Shi‘a Arabs using majoritarian democracy to catapult themselves 260

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to unprecedented degrees of political power. This led to a violent resistance from a variety of Sunni Arab militants – tribesmen, jihadists and former Ba‘thists – that descended into the ethno-religious sectarian civil war of 2006–8. Although violence had ebbed considerably by the time of the US withdrawal in 2011, sectarianism had dug its talons deep into the flesh of political and religious rhetoric across the country.2 Despite the host of deep-seated and intractable problems facing Iraq and its fledgling democracy the US brought to an end nearly nine years of military occupation in December 2011. To commemorate the event, US President Barack Obama gave a speech at Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Unable to celebrate a military ‘victory’ or claim that the US had achieved its goals of a democratic, prosperous and peaceful Iraq, the speech emphasised the valiant efforts of the US military and highlighted their resolve in the face of mounting criticism and a prolonged and unpredictable conflict. Obama did, however, see the withdrawal as a ‘moment of success’ and argued that while ‘Iraq is not a perfect place … we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq’.3 The deadly onslaught of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014 and the renewed US-led intervention in Iraq has certainly put the lie to Obama’s claim. Among the many complex and overlapping factors that led to the rise of ISIS and their stranglehold over large swaths of Iraq is the downward spiral of state–society relations across this deeply fractured nation after the 2003 intervention. A full account of this downward spiral is yet to be written, but the existing literature does point to several systemic failures of the US and the Iraqi political elite: the imposition of imperfect democratic mechanisms and institutions on a state crippled by authoritarian centralisation;4 the de-Ba‘thification of Iraq, the emergence of various insurgent groups and terrorists and the rapid descent into a cruel sectarianism that manifested in horrific violence;5 the increasingly tense relationship between Baghdad and the Kurdish Region of northern Iraq;6 and the cynical majoritarianism employed by members of the Shi‘a Arab political elite, especially Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his increasingly authoritarian style of governance.7 Drawing on this earlier research, this chapter focuses on the period following the final withdrawal of all coalition troops and documents the further deterioration of relations between the Shi‘a Arab dominated 261

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government and the Sunni Arab minority. The central argument of this chapter is that the systemic failures of both the US occupational authorities and the Iraqi political elite to manage the nuances of this relationship ultimately paved the way for the rise of the ‘Islamic State’.8 It documents how, immediately after the US withdrawal, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stepped up their aggressive and multifaceted campaign to undermine Sunni Arab political opponents and to fracture parties such as the secular and Sunni Arab dominated list of Ayad Allawi, the Iraq National Movement (or Al-Iraqiyya). Such political marginalisation and discrimination led to mass civil unrest across Sunni Arab parts of Iraq in which relatively peaceful protestors attempted to air their legitimate grievances against the state. When al-Maliki used violence to routinely suppress these civil movements, he further aggravated local communities and triggered a series of violet uprisings. The lawlessness and chaos that unfolded was quickly exploited by a complex web of Sunni Arab militants who were able to harness popular resentment toward the Shi‘a Arab dominated government to enact their deadly campaigns towards, among other things, the creation of an ‘Islamic State’. The chapter concludes by documenting the various problems facing the future of Iraq in the face of the ‘Islamic State’ and argues that the al-Abadi government and the US-led coalition must learn vital lessons about the delicacy of state–society relations in Iraq if they are to win the physical and ideological battle.

Withdrawal Symptoms Within days of the US withdrawal, al-Maliki quickly unveiled the full extent of not only his dictatorial ambitions but also his avowedly sectarian plan. He began with a carefully choreographed campaign to target senior Sunni Arab politicians, isolate Allawi and fracture Al-Iraqiyya. Immediately after returning from a visit to the White House to commemorate the formal withdrawal of the final US troops, al-Maliki sent security forces to arrest the highest ranking Sunni Arab in Iraq, Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi, who was also the former General Secretary of the key Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) and had joined Al-Iraqiyya in the lead-up to 2010 elections. Al-Maliki accused al-Hashimi of having links to Al Qaeda and of being a key figure in various terrorist operations. An arrest 262

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warrant was issued; al-Hashimi denied the charges and escaped to the safety of the Kurdish Region capital of Erbil before fleeing to Ankara in Turkey. In September 2012 the Iraqi Central Criminal Court convicted al-Hashimi and sentenced him to death in absentia.9 A full year after the accusations were made against al-Hashimi, the al-Maliki government brought similar charges against another prominent Sunni Arab politician, Rafi al-Issawi, also from the IIP. Al-Issawi had previously served as a deputy prime minister; in the lead-up to the 2010 elections he had formed his own Sunni Arab moderate party (the National Future Gathering – part of the Al-Iraqiyya list) and then served as Iraq’s Finance Minister after the elections. Al-Issawi had been vocal in his criticisms of al-Maliki and had called for al-Maliki’s resignation after the arrest warrant was issued for al-Hashimi in late 2011. In December 2012 al-Issawi was also accused of having links to Al Qaeda and government forces raided his home and arrested around 10 of his personal bodyguards.10 Whatever the facts in the cases against both al-Hashimi and al-Issawi, they have certainly been perceived by Iraq’s Sunni Arab population as having a sectarian bent, and many questions have also been raised as to why al-Maliki waited until after the US had withdrawn to charge the two men, especially given that some of the charges against al-Hashimi dated back to 2006. Al-Hashimi’s death sentence and the allegations levelled at al-Issawi were just the latest in a long list of grievances held by many Sunni Arabs against the central government that included their political marginalisation since 2003, the ongoing de-Ba‘thification, mass unemployment, insufficient investment in infrastructure and public services in Sunni Arab areas, the arrest and detention of thousands of Sunni Arabs without trial and especially the treatment of female prisoners. All of this triggered mass social unrest in the Sunni Arab dominated Anbar province from 21 December 2012. The protests began in the restive Sunni Arab majority city of Fallujah and within a matter of days the civil movement had brought Anbar to a virtual standstill, blocking a major highway used for travel and trucking to and from Jordan and Syria. A week later (28 December), the protests had spread out across many Sunni Arab dominated provinces, especially Ninewa, Saladin and Diyala with tens of thousands of disgruntled Sunnis taking part in the ‘Friday of Honour’. Central to the protests were calls for an end to de-Baathification and the ousting of al-Maliki.11 It is worth 263

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noting that the key centres of unrest – Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah – were all to fall to ISIS within 18 months of the onset of the protests. This speaks volumes about the failures of the al-Maliki government to manage state–society relations and to listen to legitimate Sunni Arab grievances, a failure that ISIS and its collaborators would seize on with devastating results over the coming months. Unfortunately, al-Maliki responded to the Sunni Arab protests in similar ways to earlier protests that had occurred across Iraq, including in the context of the broader ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.12 He utilised a potent mixture of brutal suppression and modest political and economic concessions. He began by framing the uprisings in purely sectarian terms, referring to the protestors with the language he so often used to describe Sunni Arab opponents of his regime: ‘terrorists, Ba‘thists and sectarians’.13 In terms of suppression, al-Maliki ordered the ISF to crack down on the Sunni Arab protestors, leading to many arrests, beatings and deaths. In one incident in late January 2013, the ISF opened fire on protestors in Fallujah, leaving at least seven people dead.14 The protests and their violent suppression further exposed the increasingly authoritarian and violent nature of alMaliki’s government and its ever-shrinking support base among the Sunni Arab people of Iraq. In terms of concessions, al-Maliki set up a high level committee headed by the Deputy PM for Energy and long-time political ally, Hussein alShahristani (a prominent Shi‘ite politician and member of al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition). Under al-Shahristani’s orders, the Chairman of the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC), Falah Hasan al-Shanshul (also a Shi‘i politician and part of al-Sadr’s movement) received new directives to return 4,200 seized properties and pay nearly 3,000 pensions annulled by this draconian de-Baathification body.15 By March 2013 Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and prominent Sunni Arab politician Saleh alMutlaq announced that the Council of Ministers had agreed to most of the demands of the Sunni Arab protestors, including the release of many female prisoners, and preparations were being made for direct negotiations with a delegation representing the protestors. The government also sought to address further inequities dealt out under the auspices of deBaathification; in early April they had approved a draft law amending some of the more draconian measures.16 Nonetheless the protests continued – in 264

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part because it was very difficult to gauge the sincerity of these initiatives and whether they could reverse the systemic effort to ostracise Iraq’s Sunni Arab population. For the Sunni Arabs, al-Maliki’s conciliatory gestures were a case of too little, too late. The suspicions of the Sunni Arabs proved well founded. In April 2013 and in the context of mass political unrest, Iraq held provincial elections. As had been the case at earlier elections, al-Maliki and many of the Shi‘a Arab political elite of Iraq employed an aggressive de-Baathification process to root out their political opponents and to undermine the electoral chances of various Sunni Arab political blocs.17 Not surprisingly, Al-Iraqiyya accounted for the lion’s share of all de-Baathification cases, with many of their top candidates eliminated from the electoral lists in what amounted to a highly symbolic move against their leadership. De-Baathification also saw several prominent candidates ousted from within Al-Iraqiyya splinter groups such as that of Sunni Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi’s Mutahidoun (United) bloc and Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh alMutlaq’s Arab Al-Iraqiyya. Such blatant discrimination against Sunni Arab politicians – many with only the most tenuous connection to the Ba‘thist regime – is indicative of a Shi‘a Arab political elite determined not only to oust political opponents and wage a sectarian campaign but also to tighten their stranglehold on power.

The Triumvirate of Resistance In the face of Sunni Arab political marginalisation, the protestors continued to air their grievances across several Sunni Arab majority areas. Over time, however, the protestors were, in many cases, over-run by militant groups of various shades who were growing increasingly hostile to the local ISF and to the broader Shi‘a Arab dominated Iraqi state. What needs to be mentioned here is that these militants are constituted by a complex web of different groups whose interests are often competing and sometimes overlapping. Although providing a detailed assessment of each of these groups is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that they have all capitalised on popular resentment of the toppling of the Sunni Arab dominated Ba‘thist state in 2003 and more than a decade of marginalisation, discrimination and violence at the hands of the 265

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Shi‘a Arab dominated government in Baghdad. Over this time, a web of different militant groups emerged and rapidly developed what can be described as an ‘operational relationship’, meaning that they have shared intelligence, mounted coordinated attacks and campaigns, fought alongside one another and co-held significant territory.18 It is also worth mentioning that few – if any – of these groups are likely to remain long-term allies; their allegiances are built on short-term mutual goals and common enemies, not on long-term shared aspirations or deep ideological, religious or political commonalities. There has certainly been significant animosity between and within these groups, with many now fighting against ISIS. In very crude terms, the militants can be broken down into three key groups – a triumvirate of resistance. The first are the powerful tribes of Anbar and other Sunni Arab dominated provinces whose foremost interest is to defend their traditional tribal lands, way of life and political and familial hierarchies. While there are many nuanced divisions and shifting allegiances within and between these tribes, in terms of the recent crises they can be understood as belonging to one of three categories: those who have sided with the ISF to fight the other militants, those who have sided with the militants to fight the ISF and those who have fought both the ISF and the militants to defend their tribal lands. Depending on their allegiances and intentions, various tribes have formed umbrella groups, such as the Anbar Tribal Council, which coordinate their combined efforts, in this case largely against both the ISF and ISIS.19 The second key group is an amalgam of former Ba‘thists who have come together under the leadership of two key groups. The first is the 1920 Revolution Brigades who are active in Diyala and Anbar, and the second and more powerful are the ‘Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order’ (known by the Arabic acronym JRTN), who have a strong presence in Diyala, Saladin and Nineveh. The rank-and-file of these groups is made up of disaffected Iraqi army officers who found themselves out of work after the dissolution of the Ba‘thist state following the US-led intervention of 2003. They mostly espouse traditional Ba‘thist political rhetoric, including a curious blend of pan-Arab socialism, Iraqi nationalism and Sunni Arab populism. JRTN are thought to have been led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the 70-something former Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Saddam’s regime. 266

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These first two groups  – the tribes and the Ba‘thists  – do have some strong commonalities. Saddam utilised traditional Sunni Arab tribal networks to prop up his regime and dominate the state; many senior Ba‘thists were of Sunni Arab tribal origin and maintained strong ties to their tribal networks.20 During the US occupation, the tribes and the Ba‘thists waged several attacks against coalition forces before banding together to fight radical Islamists such as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) across central and western Iraq as part of the US-sponsored ‘Awakening Council’ (see below). Indicating their more recent collaborations is the existence of the General Military Council for Iraq Revolutionaries (GMCIR), a marriage of necessity between important tribal networks, JRTN and other former Ba‘thist officers. The GMCIR was formed to respond to al-Maliki’s brutal suppression of the Anbar protests and to defend Sunni Arab people and their rights. They share a common hatred for the Shi‘a Arab dominated politics of Baghdad and the Iran-backed Shi‘a militias who have infiltrated the ranks of the ISF and have waged deadly attacks on Sunni Arab civilians. The GMCIR are extremely well organised and are structured around both conventional military chains of command and traditional tribal hierarchies (Heras, 2014). It should be noted that the success of ISIS onslaughts in tribal areas (such as in and around Ramadi and Fallujah) or in JRTN strongholds (such as Mosul and Tikrit) were in no small part due to the support and assistance of GMCIR and its constituent elements. However, when mass humanitarian tragedies unfolded at the hands of ISIS across these regions, many within GMCIR turned on the Islamists  – the JRTN has since labelled ISIS ‘barbarians’ and have fought against them in several instances.21 The third overarching group consists of various Sunni Arab Islamist/ Salafist militants which also have varied and shifting allegiances. These include groups such as the Mujahedeen Army, Kateab al-Mustapha and the Army of Muhammad. Many were initially loyal or indirectly affiliated with the mainline Al Qaeda network, but when relations deteriorated between Al Qaeda and its radical and extreme offshoot in ISIS most were left with little choice but either to have a strategic truce with ISIS or be subsumed under its leadership. Only Ansar al-Islam appears to remain loyal to Al Qaeda and, along with another Islamist militia, the Islamic Army of Iraq, has actively fought ISIS since their spectacular rise in 2014. It should be noted here that 267

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ISIS are a direct descendent of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s AQI, who not only waged a number of brutal attacks on coalition forces but also used sectarian violence to trigger the 2006–8 civil war. Following the assassination of Zarqawi by the US in 2006 and the troop surge of 2007, AQI rebranded themselves the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and bided their time. In 2011 the Arab Spring spread across the region, toppling several deeply entrenched regimes. While these events have led to some modest democratic reform (Tunisia), they have also ushered in a return to authoritarian suppression (Egypt) and a descent into lawlessness and inter-tribal warfare (Libya). In Syria, when President Bashar al-Assad (who is an Alawite, a sub-branch of Shi‘ism) used horrific violence to quash relatively peaceful protests, the nation rapidly descended into a brutal civil war with important sectarian dimensions. This, coupled with the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, enabled ISIS to unleash an ambitious expansion on a scale they could not have imagined only a year earlier. They engaged in a deadly sectarian battle against the Shi‘a dominated governments of both alAssad in Syria and al-Maliki in Iraq. In March 2013 they took the northern Syrian city of Raqqa and expanded east to capture large swaths of land before re-entering Iraq. They conducted a number of co-ordinated but brazen attacks in Iraq, most notably at the notorious and heavily fortified Abu Ghraib prison in western Baghdad where, in July 2013, 500 inmates were freed including many senior jihadists. In February 2014, Al Qaeda formally broke ties with ISIS for several key reasons: ISIS refused to take orders from Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri; ISIS fought several deadly battles against the officially sanctioned representatives of Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq – most notably Jabhat al-Nusra; and also because their ideology was so extreme and their treatment of civilians was so cruel that Al Qaeda did not want to be associated with such primitive brutality.22

Adding Fuel to the Fire As these various groups exploited the lawlessness and mayhem triggered by the protest encampments across Sunni Arab parts of Iraq, al-Maliki knew that he had to take action. He understood that it would be extremely difficult to dislodge the protestors and the militants, particularly in their key strongholds across Anbar, without further aggravating the situation. He 268

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needed to make an example of someone. On 19 April 2013 (the day before the provincial elections), protestors in the small Sunni Arab majority town of Hawija (Kirkuk Province) marched towards an Iraqi army checkpoint, sparking an armed confrontation that left one protestor and one ISF personnel dead. This provided al-Maliki with the opportunity he needed; elite security units attached to his office retaliated swiftly, opening fire on the protestors, leaving 51 people dead and more than 100 wounded. It set off a spiral of violence that saw revenge attacks by armed Sunni Arab tribesmen, various Islamist militants and Ba‘thist loyalists against the ISF with clashes continuing for several days.23 The violence spread, including to the restive town of Sulaiman Bek north of Baghdad, where a combination of ISIS and JRTN stormed government buildings. The Iraqi army surrounded the village and used helicopter gunships to fire on the assailants, dislodging the militants but also leading to civilian deaths.24 After the incidents in Hawija and Sulaiman Bek, al-Maliki showed no remorse, instead arguing that: Security forces must impose security in Iraq, which is affected by a region teeming with sectarianism … and now we are starting to see those problems come to us … What happened in Hawija and what is happening today in Sulaiman Bek and other places is a point in which we should stop and think because it might lead to sectarian strife … Everyone would lose. Whether he is in the north, the south, east or west of Iraq, if the fire of sectarianism starts, everyone’s fingers will be burned by it.25

However, instead of putting out the ‘fire of sectarianism’ by deploying the diplomatic skills of a leading statesman to negotiate the complex grievances of the Sunni Arab population, al-Maliki exacerbated the conflict with a typically brutish response. In late December 2013, when protestors in the Sunni Arab strongholds of Ramadi and Fallujah ignored his deadline to abandon their protests, al-Maliki launched operation ‘Revenge for Commander Mohammed’. The ISF marched on Anbar to wage war against Sunni Arab militants – but also to dismantle the protest encampments. AlMaliki believed that he could put an end to the uprisings and the increasing presence of radical militants in one week.26 He could not have been more wrong. The ISF engaged in several skirmishes with militants in Ramadi and Fallujah, with some initial successes. However, on the 28 December 2013 269

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al-Maliki made his first mistake by ordering the arrest of prominent Sunni Arab MP Ahmed al-Alwani, a member of the Al-Iraqiyya block, a leader of the al-Alwan tribe and an ardent supporter of the protests. The ISF raided his home in Ramadi with heavy casualties on both sides – which further aggravated the protestors and the tribes.27 Fearing strong retaliation, by 31 December the ISF had fully withdrawn from the two cities. This was al-Maliki’s second mistake. As soon as the ISF withdrew, Sunni Arab militants threatened to seize control of both Ramadi and Fallujah. By 2 January 2014 they had occupied mosques, set fire to police stations and broken into prisons and freed inmates. Al-Maliki then reversed his decision, sending troops back into both Ramadi and Fallujah. This led to days of bloody fighting in which the ISF heavily shelled parts of the two cities, leading to many casualties but few credible gains.28 As the fighting continued and both sides took heavy casualties, al-Maliki repeatedly threatened to storm the two cities and end the crisis once and for all.29 When such threats proved futile, al-Maliki re-ignited the US strategy of allowing Sunni Arab tribes to fight on behalf of the state against other militants – especially ISIS. The US favoured the plans and rushed weapons and ammunition into the hands of al-Maliki, urging him to distribute them in Anbar in the hope that the Sunni Arab tribes would defeat ISIS and their escalating grip on Syria and Iraq. The ISF handed out untold amounts of weapons, ammunition and money to Sunni Arab tribal fighters. This followed in the wake of the supposed successes of the 2006–8 Awakening Council (‘Sons of Iraq’), a Sunni Arab alliance of tribal sheikhs mostly from the Anbar province who had fought off AQI on US salaries.30 Coupled with the US troop surge in 2007, this strategy was to pay dividends and by early 2008 violence across Anbar and most of Iraq had eased considerably. This led to premature triumphalism and self-congratulatory rhetoric claiming that the US counter-insurgency strategy had defeated AQI once and for all.31 However, when the US pressured al-Maliki to absorb the Sunni Arab fighters into the ISF in 2008, although a few hundred were initially welcomed, the vast majority were neglected. This left thousands of Sunni Arabs who had fought hard against AQI without an income and likely targets should the terrorists return. Having been so disappointed by their treatment at the hands of alMaliki after the successes of the first ‘Awakening Council’ it is not surprising 270

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that the 2014 attempt to re-ignite the movement was an abject failure. By mid-February 2014 it was increasingly clear that the strategy of arming local tribes would not work. The Sunni Arab tribes were not only unable to defeat ISIS and other militants, in some instances the supplied weapons were used to fuel inter-tribal warfare.32 More problematic was the fact that as ISIS defeated the ISF and the tribes, they came into possession of a great deal of additional military equipment and weapons. As had been the case in their fight against government forces and other militants in Syria and in earlier skirmishes in Iraq, the military capacity of ISIS increased with every victory. The difference in Anbar during early 2014 was that ISIS victories were delivering them virtually brand new US-supplied military equipment, including everything from night vision goggles to Humvees and from M16s to rocket launchers. Their enhanced military capacity and their ideological zeal catapulted them through several rapid victories in Anbar, taking near full control of Fallujah, more of Ramadi and capturing the strategically positioned town of Karma.33 They celebrated their victories with a series of brazen military parades, including in Fallujah, where on 20 March 2014 they displayed the Humvees and weapons they had taken from the ISF – the first of many such parades as ISIS expanded its operations.34 From their strongholds in Anbar, ISIS began to expand their influence across other parts of Iraq. By late February 2014 they were considered an active threat in three additional central provinces with significant Sunni Arab populations: Diyala, Saladin and Nineveh.35 By April ISIS had expanded even further – virtually surrounding Baghdad. This included mounting sophisticated and coordinated attacks and even temporarily occupying towns and villages in Babil Province as well as in western and northern Baghdad.36 It appears that ISIS had learnt a great deal from the earlier failings of AQI and from their own endeavours in Fallujah. Before capturing large swaths of land across Iraq and imposing strict Sharia law, they understood that they needed first to win the loyalty of local Sunni Arab populations and to draw the ISF into bloody and asymmetric ambushes to erode their confidence. To achieve these two goals, ISIS moved quickly from one location to another, mounting unpredictable but devastating attacks. To get local Sunni Arab support, they portrayed many of these early clashes as retaliations for the mistreatment of Iraq’s Sunni Arab population (rather than as a holy jihad towards the 271

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establishment of an ‘Islamic State’). They were also initially very reluctant to use hard-line Islamist rhetoric or to impose strict Sharia law (which they have since done). Instead, they harnessed popular Sunni Arab resentment of the Shi‘a Arab dominated government by training and mobilising marginalised Sunni Arab populations against the state. They would rapidly enter a town, stage dramatic and deadly attacks against the local ISF, arm and train anyone who pledged to fight with them and then evacuate, leaving behind comrades and sleeper cells that could be called upon in the future. By the time of the April 2014 federal elections in Iraq, the ISF had in fact lost territory and suffered very heavy casualties at the hands of ISIS and the various militants of Sunni Arab dominated regions. All of this not only highlights the failures of the ISF despite nearly a decade of training and more than US$20 billion in funding, but also compounded al-Maliki’s sliding popularity in Iraqi political circles, especially as he was the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and had direct supervision of the Ministries of the Interior and Defence.37 By 2014 virtually every major figure from across Iraq’s ethno-religious and ideological spectrum had begun to speak out publicly against al-Maliki using the strongest possible language – he was routinely referred to as ‘sectarian’, ‘violent’, ‘tyrannical’ and a ‘dictator’.38 Despite his dwindling popularity among Iraq’s political elite, al-Maliki remained determined to contest and win the 2014 federal elections. As with earlier elections, he undertook an aggressive two-pronged strategy to undermine his opponents. The first was to use de-Baathification to oust prominent Sunni Arabs and other opponents. In total around 400– 500 candidates were initially excluded by the AJC because of their ties to the former regime. Meanwhile, probably under pressure from al-Maliki’s office, the Iraq Higher Electoral Commission disqualified a further 70 candidates because they failed to fulfil the requirements of recent amendments to Iraqi Electoral Law which stated that all prospective candidates must ‘be of good conduct and shall not be convicted for a dishonourable crime’.39 The list included prominent Sunni Arabs such as al-Issawi (Mutahidoun), Abd Diab al-Ojaili and Haider al-Mulla (both from Al-Iraqiyya) as well as vocal Sunni secularist Mithal al-Alusi.40 Although many of the banned candidates do stand accused of various serious crimes, the evidence has 272

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never been made public and it is therefore difficult to gauge the accuracy of the accusations. What is clear, however, is that each of them had actively and publicly criticised the Prime Minister.41 The second key strategy was the culmination of al-Maliki’s ‘divide and rule’ approach to Iraqi politics. Due to minor changes in Iraqi electoral law, but also due to al-Maliki’s fracturing of Iraq’s already hostile political culture, the 2014 elections saw the different parties competing against each other on separate lists rather than presenting a unified front under larger blocks as they had done in the federal elections of 2005 and 2010.42 Proof of the heavy toll that the previous four years had taken on Sunni Arab politics can be seen in the fact that the bloc with the largest number of seats after the 2010 elections, the once powerful and united Al-Iraqiyya, was now in ruins. Rather than coming together to promote a unified front, each of its constituent members had split into rival blocs that competed against one another. The most prominent of these was the Mutahidoun bloc, which was led by the Speaker of Parliament Osama al-Nujaifi. This bloc is generally understood to have been the political heart of the Anbar protests, and al-Nujaifi rose to prominence as an outspoken advocate of Sunni issues in the face of al-Maliki’s blatant sectarianism. The other major Sunni bloc is al-Arabiyya, which is headed by deputy PM Saleh al-Mutlaq, leaving Allawi with his smaller Sunni/secular alliance, the al-Wataniya (National) bloc.43 Al-Maliki’s strategy of ousting and/or dividing his Sunni Arab political opponents was to pay dividends. Although he had not secured the 165 seats needed for a majority, a stalemate set in immediately after the election and there was a significant delay in forming a government. As had been the case for nine months in 2010, al-Maliki became the ‘interim’ prime minister. Following the election al-Maliki decided to ramp up the military campaign against the militants in Anbar. On 9 May 2014 the ISF undertook a renewed and large-scale effort to root out the militants and end the siege in Fallujah. The operation was dubbed the ‘Settlement of Accounts’ and involved a joint operation between tribal factions and various elements of the ISF, including ground troops, counter-terrorism units, combat helicopters and forces attached to the Ministry of Interior, who used heavy artillery and airstrikes to bombard the town. Most troublingly, the attack on Fallujah saw the first of many reports accusing the ISF of using barrel 273

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bombs, which are banned under international conventions due to their indiscriminate nature and their tendency to inflict mass deaths and wanton destruction. According to one report countless ‘mosques, houses and markets’ were destroyed in the attacks.44 Another report from Human Rights Watch documented the sustained attacks by the ISF on the Fallujah General Hospital, including direct fire and mortar shelling of the site from January until at least May 2014 – another clear violation of international conventions regarding the conduct of warfare.45 Over this same period, according to a UN-cited report by the Anbar Provincial Council, over 60,000 families had been displaced from Fallujah alone, a significant percentage of whom left in May.46 It is little wonder that figures such as the Sunni Grand Mufti of Iraq Sheikh Rafi al-Rifa’i, speaking at a Human Rights conference at the European Parliament in Brussels, stated that: The Iraqi government, represented by the prime minister and commander of the armed forces, exercises hateful sectarianism which uses excessive force against Iraqi people, and the Sunnis in Iraq have suffered most from the injustice of this government … [in Fallujah they are committing] genocide in which the current Iraqi government [has] used all kinds of heavy and medium weaponry … The Iraqi government was intent on dividing the people, leading to a civil war in which the only loser would be the Iraqi people.47

As news spread to other Sunni Arab parts of Iraq regarding the brutal and indiscriminate attack on Fallujah, animosity against the Shi‘a Arab dominated government reached boiling point. In June 2014, with the help of other Sunni Arab militants, ISIS staged a number of sudden, brazen and spectacular attacks, capturing additional territory across central and northern Iraq and conquering key cities such as Mosul and Tikrit.48 In a matter of days, ISIS had bulldozed key parts of the border between Iraq and Syria and declared their new ‘Islamic State’. Having seized such large swaths of territory, they began to impose their strict fundamentalist vision: they set up makeshift Sharia law courts in which ‘infidels’ (non-Muslims, those who refused to publicly endorse their ideology and even those accused of petty crimes like drinking alcohol) were tried and, in many cases, executed; women and young girls were forced into marriages, raped or sold as sex slaves; various minority communities such as Yazidis and Christians were 274

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slaughtered and thousands were forced to flee; mass graves were hastily dug and filled with the corpses of military personnel or local militias (mostly Shi‘a) who had fought against the sudden ISIS onslaught. With every victory ISIS increased in strength, money, military equipment and prestige among their fellow militant Sunni jihadists. Given the deadly ISIS advance, al-Maliki came under enormous international and domestic pressure to step aside, which he did in September 2014. Following a series of complex political negotiations in Baghdad a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, emerged, along with the creation of a new Iraqi government (in which al-Maliki retains a position as one of three Iraqi vice-presidents). More than any Iraqi government that has preceded it, the al-Abadi government faces a host of deep-seated and intractable problems. Firstly, the Iraqi government currently has active control of roughly one-third of the country – the Shi‘a Arab south – with the Kurdish Region and most of the disputed territories under the auspices of Erbil and the rest of Iraq suffering under the tyranny of ISIS and its allies. Secondly, the al-Abadi government is forced to plead with a hesitant US and its coalition partners, who have done much to confront ISIS via airstrikes and with support for various forces on the ground but show no signs of committing troops of their own or working towards a decisive conclusion to the conflict in neighbouring Syria. Thirdly, the Iran-sponsored Shi‘a militias that have (re)emerged are a mixed blessing to al-Abadi and his government – they are often praised for having staunched the ISIS advance south but also routinely criticised for their cruel and violent attitude to local Sunni Arab populations.

Conclusion The greatest challenge facing the future of Iraq lies beyond the bloodlust of ISIS, a reluctant international community and the threat of Shi‘a militias. The greatest challenge facing Iraq is the urgent need for a delicate and compassionate renegotiation of the contours and texture of state–society relations in this deeply troubled country. One of the many lessons that can be learned from the failings of the 2003 intervention and the series of profound mistakes made by the Iraqi political elite ever since is the fragility of state–society relations in nations riven with ethno-religious differences 275

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and suffering from the legacy of brutal dictatorship and decades of violent and protracted war. This chapter demonstrates that when such delicate relations are met with measures such as excessive de-Baathification, electoral manipulation, the violent suppression of legitimate protests and new forms of authoritarianism, the already tenuous relationship between the state and the broader society can degenerate rapidly. When this happens, powerful movements emerge that speak directly to the disenfranchised elements of a society, filling the physical and ideological vacuum left behind by the state. In Iraq, this vacuum was filled by a triumvirate of Sunni Arab resistance movements that gave way to the declaration of an ‘Islamic State’. While to date most of the attention has focused on how to defeat ISIS militarily, economically and politically, the bigger question is how to defeat them ideologically – to defeat the idea of the ‘Islamic State’. In Iraq, the only real way to do this is for the Iraqi state to help Iraqis of all backgrounds come to terms with the complex and deeply painful legacies of the past towards a sense of agency and belonging in a new and cohesive society.

Notes 1. Benjamin Isakhan, Democracy in Iraq:  History, Politics, Discourse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Benjamin Isakhan (ed.), The Legacy of Iraq: From the 2003 War to the ‘Islamic State’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 2. Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 3. President Barack Obama, Fort Bragg, 14 December 2011. 4. Zaid al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future:  How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism have Undermined Democracy (London:  Yale University Press, 2014); Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq:  Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 5. Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq. 6. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘The Iraqi Kurdish response to the “Islamic State”: political leverage in times of crisis’, in Gareth R. Stansfield (ed.), The Kurdish Question Revisited: Essays on the Transformation of the Kurdish Situation in the Middle East (London:  Hurst, 2016); Gareth R. Stansfield, ‘The Islamic State, the Kurdistan Region and the future of Iraq: assessing UK policy options’, International Affairs 90/6 (2014), pp. 1329–50. 7. Toby Dodge, Iraq:  From War to New Authoritarianism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

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THE ROAD TO THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’ 8. This chapter, written in February 2015 and updated in April 2015, reflects a very specific and rapidly evolving sequence of events triggered by the expansion of ISIS across western and central Iraq. It documents the lead-up to these events in the fractious relationship between Iraq’s Shi‘a Arab ruling elite and the Sunni Arab population. No doubt the situation – for ISIS, the Shi‘a Arab government, and the Sunni Arab people of Iraq – will have changed dramatically by the time of publication. 9. BBC News, ‘Iraq VP Tariq Al-Hashemi sentenced to death’, 9 September 2012. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19537301. 10. BBC News, ‘Iraq’s Sunni finance minister denounces raids’, 21 December 2012. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20808769. 11. Al-Jazeera, ‘Iraq mass protests mount pressure on Maliki’, 28 December 2012. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/12/01212287 5346526845.html. 12. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Protests and public power in post-Saddam Iraq: the case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions’, in Luca Anceschi, Gennaro Gervasio and Andrea Teti (eds), Informal Powers in the Greater Middle East:  Hidden Geographies (London:  Routledge, 2014), pp.  117–28; Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Doing democracy in difficult times: oil unions and the Maliki government’, in Isakhan, The Legacy of Iraq, pp. 125–37. 13. Al-Maliki in Ali Abd-al-Amir, ‘Maliki’s sectarian populism working among Iraqi Shi‘ites’, Al-Hayat, 17 May 2013. 14. Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango, ‘Iraq parliament votes to keep Maliki from seeking new term’, New York Times, 26 January 2013. 15. Ali A.  Sadah, ‘Maliki makes concessions on de-Baathification’, Al-Monitor, 18 January 2013. 16. Ali A.  Sadah, ‘Maliki faces tough political choices ahead of elections’, Al-Monitor, 11 April 2013. 17. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘The de-Baathification of post-2003 Iraq: purging the past for political power’, in Isakhan The Legacy of Iraq, pp. 21–35. 18. Nicholas A. Heras, ‘The tribal component of Iraq’s Sunni rebellion: the General Military Council for Iraqi revolutionaries’, Terrorism Monitor 12/13 (2014). 19. Omar Ali, ‘Anbar tribal leader: Maliki is “more dangerous” than ISIS’, Rudaw, 6 July 2014. Available at http://rudaw.net/mobile/english/interview/06072014. 20. Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), pp. 152, 262–5. 21. Elias Groll, ‘Saddam deputy “King of Clubs” reported dead in Iraq’, Foreign Policy, 17 April 2015. 22. Liz Sly, ‘Al-Qaeda disavows any ties with radical Islamist ISIS group in Syria, Iraq’, New York Times, 3 February 2014. 23. Tim Arango, ‘Iraq revokes licenses of Al-Jazeera and 9 other TV channels’, New York Times, 28 April 2013.

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STATE AND SOCIETY IN IRAQ 24. Tim Arango, ‘Iraqi Premier urges talks but vows to battle insurgents’, New York Times, 25 April 2013. 25. Al-Maliki, ibid. 26. Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango, ‘Qaeda-aligned militants threaten key Iraqi cities’, New York Times, 2 January 2014. 27. Mushreq Abbas, ‘Resolution of Anbar crisis requires security, political coordination’, Al-Monitor, 3 January 2014. 28. Ibid. 29. Mustafa Habib, ‘Out the back door:  secret deal with Anbar tribes sees AlQaeda leave Falluja’, Niqash, 9 January 2014; Ali Adel Sadah, ‘Anbar province headed toward isolation’, Al-Monitor, 3 February 2014. 30. John A. McCary, ‘The Anbar Awakening:  an alliance of incentives’, The Washington Quarterly 32/1 (2009), pp. 43–59. 31. Daniel R. Green, ‘The Fallujah Awakening: a case study in counter-insurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 21/4 (2010), pp. 591–609; Andrew Phillips, ‘How Al Qaeda lost Iraq’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 63/1 (2009), pp. 64–84. 32. Mushreq Abbas, ‘The political roots of the Anbar crisis’, Al-Monitor, 12 February 2014; Tim Arango and Duraid Adnan, ‘Militants pose threat on eve of national election in Iraq’, New York Times, 28 April 2014. 33. Ghazi and Arango, ‘Qaeda-aligned militants threaten key Iraqi cities’. 34. Mushreq Abbas, ‘ISIS shifts tactics in Falluja’, Al-Monitor, 26 March 2014. 35. Omar al-Jaffal, ‘Iraq’s battle against extremists spreads outside Anbar’, Al-Monitor, 25 February 2014. 36. Mushreq Abbas, ‘Is ISIS planning for new Fallujahs?’, Al-Monitor, 13 March 2014; and ‘ISIS expands in areas around Baghdad’, Al-Monitor, 4 April 2014. 37. Harith al-Qarawee, ‘Maliki launches counterattack against opponents’, Al-Monitor, 1 September 2013. 38. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘Shattering the Shi‘a: a Maliki political strategy in postSaddam Iraq’, in The Legacy of Iraq, pp. 76–8. 39. Cited in Mushreq Abbas, ‘Disqualified candidates spark controversy in Iraq’, Al-Monitor, 19 March 2014. 40. Harith al-Qarawee, ‘Iraqi judiciary accused of bias, failure’, Al-Monitor, 28 March 2014. 41. Niqash, ‘Banned for bad behaviour: criticising Iraqi PM enough to get MPs banned from elections?’, 20 March 2014. 42. Isakhan, ‘Shattering the Shi‘a’. 43. Reidar Visser, ‘Full list of election candidates’, Iraq Business News, 7 April 2014. 44. Al-Jazeera, ‘Iraq army “using barrel bombs” in Fallujah’, 11 May 2014.

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THE ROAD TO THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’ 45. Human Rights Watch, ‘Iraq:  government attacking Fallujah hospital; barrel bombs hit residential areas’, 27 May 2014. Available at https://www.hrw.org/ news/2014/05/27/iraq-government-attacking-fallujah-hospital. 46. United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Situation Report: Anbar Humanitarian Crisis, vol. 24 (Baghdad: United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, 2014). 47. Al-Rifa’i cited in Abdulla Mustafa, ‘Iraqi Sunni Grand Mufti accuses Maliki of “genocide” in Anbar’, Asharq Al-Awsat, 24 February 2014. 48. Benjamin Isakhan, ‘The Iraq legacies and the roots of the “Islamic State”’ in The Legacy of Iraq, pp. 223–35.

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Conclusion: Lessons from the Past for a Future Iraq Benjamin Isakhan and Shamiran Mako

Since the formation of the Iraqi state in 1921, successive leaders have attempted to reconcile and consolidate the state with its divided society. While the patterns and processes that determined the trajectory of state building have evolved over time and throughout various ‘critical junctures’, the mechanisms employed to create and define the parameters of state–society relations have reproduced various forms of resistance and contestation from citizens against the state. Thus, understanding and reconceptualising state–society relations in Iraq requires an analysis of the various forms of boundary making that have shaped both compliance and resistance against the state and its ruling elite throughout successive time periods. This volume maps the evolution and development of interactions between state and society along a temporal continuum, illuminating the multivariate dynamics of boundary making throughout three critical statebuilding periods: the creation of the state under British occupation and the monarchy it imposed (1920–58); the birth of the republic and the succession of increasingly authoritarian regimes that followed (1958–2003); and the US-led intervention and the attempted democratisation post-2003. By converging the macro with the micro, the chapters in this volume have questioned the state-centric, top-down approach to analysing state–society relations in Iraq and instead underscored the importance of the horizontal 280

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and asymmetrical societal power dynamics that affect the state’s actions and reactions to governing its diverse and fragmented society. Embracing post-structuralist, bottom-up and state-in-society approaches, the contributors have collectively granted agency to the various social factors that have influenced the Iraqi state such as non-state socio-religious institutions, civil society, grassroots activists and counter-hegemonic ‘organic’ intellectuals – all of which have played a critical role in shaping Iraq’s political history. In doing so, this volume highlights the diversity and fragility of societal organisations in Iraq, and that such sites of power – ethnic groups, religious bodies, oppositional politics, village and tribal hierarchies and cultural production – served different roles in enforcing and/or negating the rules and structures of the state. Emphasising the multifaceted constraints that structure behaviour and drive resistance between the Iraqi state and its society enables scholars of Iraq and the wider region to identify, analyse and reframe the processes of political change over time. Rather than taking a ‘snapshot’ of state–society relations, this volume’s longitudinal analysis of the multiplicity of factors and actors that have affected state–society relations demonstrates both the weakness of the Iraqi state to penetrate society and the forms and modes of resistance against structural and institutional constraints by divergent segments of society against the state; thus granting a nuanced conceptualisation of the primary drivers of societal resistance and change. This volume has therefore taken a significant step toward further understanding the diversity of actors and discourses that have shaped state–society relations in Iraq and future research on this topic is urgently needed and strongly encouraged. The contributions to this volume are underpinned by four key themes that require further emphasis in this conclusion and which point the way forward for future research. First, there are the failures of top-down statebuilding and the reliance on ad-hoc institutions that privileged small sections of the population. Second, there are the cynical relationships that the Iraqi state routinely developed with other sites of power, especially key ethno-religious factions. Perceiving a threat they couldn’t suppress, the state made either promises it didn’t keep or short-lived token concessions, only to suddenly U-turn when the threat subsided and the respective population was suitably pacified. A third 281

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theme centres on the complexity within Iraq’s many different groups, which have for too long been analysed in monolithic terms. This has oversimplified the complexity of the evolving relationships between certain groups and the state. Lastly, there are the ways in which the failures of state–society relations bred a virulent culture of resistance that manifested itself not just in horrific violence and bloody coups, but also in political opposition, rich counter-narratives and a sequence of protest movements that agitated for change. Understanding these four interconnected themes is vital to resolving Iraq’s many current crises and underpins any hope of developing forms of state–society relations that are conducive to stability, cohesion and prosperity. As stated, the first key theme that emerges in this volume is the failures of top-down statebuilding. In such processes, the architects of the state have typically adhered to two central principles: an avowed belief in the power of institutions to build coherence and enforce cohesion; and a practice of privileging certain segments of Iraqi society who suddenly found themselves thrust into power. As several chapters in this volume have demonstrated, not only were such institutions arbitrarily imposed on a diverse population, they were also typically designed to serve the interests of foreign empires and the small band of elites carefully chosen as the guardians of the state. This is just as true of the Iraqi education system and military foisted on the Iraqi people by the British in the earliest days of the new state as it is for the various institutions designed by the US-led coalition authorities as guarantors of their aspirations to democratise Iraq. In the process, the imposition of these institutions relied on a complex, overlapping and ever-shifting process of inclusion and exclusion that served to marginalise large segments of the population. This has proved to be an extremely ineffective and unstable approach, in no small part because the imposed institutions never evolved organically and were never premised on the consent of the governed. In such a scenario, it is little wonder that the institutions and the elites who managed them inadvertently sowed the seeds of dissent, resistance and rivalry that had myriad (often violent) consequences once the rulers of that epoch had been usurped. A key problem, however, has been that throughout Iraq’s tumultuous political history, many have bought into the official state narrative seeking to reap the rich rewards that came with compliance. This is, of 282

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course, firstly true for those who were privileged in the process of state building – the Sunni Arab urban elite under the British and the Shi‘a Arab exiles favoured by the US after 2003. But others also benefitted from these processes, particularly those employed in various public service roles but, more importantly, the local elites who received incentives to work with, rather than against, the state; who received rich rewards for maintaining the status quo. A seminal example documented in this volume is the Shi‘a Arab religious scholars in the Hawza who spied on their brethren for the Ba‘th in exchange for rarely doled-out privileges. Such situations create another layer of divisions between those who benefit from the state (and therefore want to see it maintained) and those who suffer perceived or real marginalisation or persecution at the hands of the state (and therefore want to see it reformed or removed). The problem in Iraq, as with elsewhere, is that all too often such individuals are neighbours; citizens are therefore split not just along ethnic, religious and political lines but also according to their allegiance to the state. This points to another key theme of this volume, namely the relationship between the state and other key sites of power. A pattern emerges throughout the chapters: when the Iraqi state was weak, the elites were forced to make tactical concessions with otherwise disenfranchised ethno-religious minorities, only to ignore, undermine or, more commonly, suppress these groups when the state had regathered its strength. This relationship manifests itself in several different instances throughout the volume, such as in the relationship between Baghdad and the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk or the Assyrian Christian population. But perhaps the most prominent example is that of the Kurds. While Kurdish ethno-nationalism has mostly stood in opposition to the modern Iraqi state since its inception, this is in no small part because the Kurds have routinely been made promises by a succession of empires and kings, dictators and demagogues, only to see agreements overturned and hard-won liberties undermined. The complex sequence of broken promises and failed compromises between Baghdad and Erbil over Kurdish oil exports and the disputed territories since 2003 is a case in point. The danger is that in the worst instances, the tensions between the state and certain segments of the broader society manifests in horrific genocidal campaigns – such as Saddam’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the 1980s. This pattern of broken promises and tactical 283

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concessions followed by waves of exclusion and persecution has played a critical role in shaping state–society relations in Iraq, not least because they breed mistrust, refuse agency and inflame divisions. Another theme evident in this volume is that while Iraq is all too often understood to be made up of Shi‘a Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and smaller minorities, it is a mistake to think of these groups as politically or socially monolithic. Throughout this book we get several insights into the competing visions within such groups. One example that stands out is the complex relationship between the Iraqi state and different – often competing – elements within the Assyrian Christian community. This is true of the Assyrians of the Ba‘qubah refugee camp of the 1920s, who were not only sharply divided along tribal and religious lines but also along degrees of allegiance and resistance to the newly imposed Iraqi state. Later in the book we peer into a similarly complex relationship, this time between the Assyrians and the Ba‘th. On the one hand the rural Assyrians of northern Iraq were deeply frustrated with, and routinely persecuted by, the state, while on the other hand the urban Assyrians of Baghdad went through a period of relative peace and cultural florescence, as is evidenced by the various Assyrian magazines, music and poetry that emerged during this time. Coming to terms with the complexity of state–society relations in Iraq therefore requires moving beyond an examination of relations between a centralised state and a network of monolithic socio-political groups to an appreciation of the divergent narratives within such communities. It is little wonder that all of this – the imposition of state institutions and the privileging of certain elites, the cocktail of concessions and oppression, and the divisions within Iraq’s many different ethno-religious groups – has converged to create a virulent culture of resistance. Indeed, a key theme of this book is the myriad ways in which the Iraqi people have carried out overt and covert resistance against the state. It would be straightforward enough to point to the ways in which such resistance has routinely manifested itself in horrific violence – from separatist guerrillas, bloody coups, sectarian militias and Islamist extremists. But in many instances such violence was a last resort, a reaction to the tyranny of the state, utilised when other mechanisms of airing grievances or expressing dissent were either ignored or brutally suppressed. Indeed, the chapters collected here point to several other patters of resistance. 284

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The first is that of Iraq’s many oppositional political movements. Key to understanding the evolving nature of Iraq’s state–society relations is the extent to which various political ideologies – socialism, communism, panArabism, Iraqi nationalism, ethno-nationalism, Islamism  – have manifested themselves in organised political movements. Unfortunately, many such movements have promised new and egalitarian political arrangements, only to stage bloody coups or armed insurgencies before seizing the reins of power and crushing all opposition. But others have been more modest in their aims and less autocratic once in power. One such example documented here is the brief incumbency of Qasim after the 1958 revolution. Although he was ultimately undone by the repression of his own support base in the student movements of the time, he can also be acknowledged as one of few modern Iraqi leaders who sought to foster some diversity of debate about the creation of a new and independent Iraq. A similar example can be found in the key Kurdish parties of the KDP and the PUK and the ushering in of democratic institutions under their leadership from 1991. However, while the Kurdish enclave does demonstrate that organised political parties can offer coherent alternatives to the central Iraqi state, the centralisation of power by the KDP and large-scale corruption by the ruling elite has stalled the KRG’s democratic experiment. But contestation and resistance is not always embodied in formal political parties. Iraq has a proud tradition of ‘organic’ intellectuals who have penned epic poems, weighty academic tomes and heart-wrenching songs. Unfortunately, state-sponsored cultural production, particularly under the Ba‘thist regime, sought to co-opt these academics and artists to manipulate society and coerce the minds of the citizens into subservience. A prominent example documented in this volume is the prominent historians who reinterpreted the earliest years of Islamic history under direct orders from the Ba‘thist state. The goal was to legitimate the state in the eyes of the religious population, demonstrating that the Ba‘th were the product of an authentically Arab past with deep roots in Islamic civilisation. Such overt co-optation of Iraq’s cultural production is sharply juxtaposed by those who used their craft to record their grievances and hold to account those in power. In this volume, such counter-hegemonic narratives are documented several times: Assyrian poets who lamented the Siemele massacres of the 1930s, and the short story writers of the late colonial period who 285

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documented the brutal crackdown by the state on the 1952 Intifada. Such discourses serve as a microscope through which one can see the minutiae of state–society relations and decipher the impact of state policy on those most affected by it. However, perhaps the most prominent mechanism of resistance to the state discussed throughout this volume is the role of civil society: the set of social and civic institutions that are distinct from the state but mediate its relationship with the broader citizen body. A key contribution of this book to the existing literature lies in its detailed examination of various protest movements (and other forms of civil unrest and resistance) that sprang up to air grievances and agitate for change. Such protests and movements are a key barometer of state–society relations, the pulse of the Iraqi street. A pattern that emerges throughout this volume is that when violence is deployed by the state to crush legitimate protests, it not only further galvanises the movement and underscores the truth of their claims, it also leads to the deterioration of state legitimacy in the eyes of the citizen body and thereby sows the seeds of their downfall. Two such examples are worth dwelling on here. The first is the 1952 Intifada in which the Iraqi Communist Party and other left-leaning opposition groups staged mass protests, and the second is the student-led protests that swept across Baghdad a decade later, in 1962. In both cases, the movements were violently suppressed by the state, including the detention of scores of students, poets, lecturers, lawyers, writers and politicians. Such aggressive crackdowns demonstrated the insecurities of the respective regimes – first the monarchy and then that of Qasim – and, in the eyes of those who would usurp the state, legitimated the use of violence to do so. A third, and far more recent, example is also worth mentioning here. From December 2012 a sequence of protests emerged across the Sunni Arab heartland of central and western Iraq. Initially, these protests centred on a legitimate expression of Sunni Arab marginalisation and neglect by the Shi‘a Arab dominated state, coupled with calls for the ousting of al-Maliki. However, the failures of the al-Maliki government to resolve Sunni Arab grievances and its use of horrific state violence – such as helicopter gunships and barrel bombs – to quash the protests only served to further widen the gap between the Iraqi state and Sunni Arab society. Into this vacuum a triumvirate of resistance (re-)emerged in which former Ba‘thists, 286

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Sunni Arab tribal leaders and Islamist groups such as ISIS banded together to oppose the state. Leveraging early successes and a rapid deterioration of the Iraqi Security Forces, ISIS were able to take the upper hand, conquering key parts of Iraq and imposing their deadly Islamist vision. In coming to terms with ISIS and the sequence of challenges they present to Iraq’s state–society relations, it is crucial to remember that key sites of the protests from 2012 – Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah – fell to ISIS within 18 months, in no small part because of the Iraqi state’s preference for violence over negotiation. The key to ousting ISIS and to creating a positive and prosperous future for Iraq therefore lies in learning vital lessons from Iraq’s past  – and from the key themes of this book. While political solutions are part of the answer, meeting the tyranny of the ‘Islamic State’ with a faith in the power of top-down political institutions to manage difference will only deepen the rift between those ensconced in the heavily fortified International Zone in Baghdad and those who have no stake in the political machinations of the capital. Worse still, if such processes are perceived to privilege certain elements of Iraqi society this will only add to the deep sense that the entire post-2003 period has been less about democracy and more about a dramatic shift in power in which the oppressed have now become the oppressors. To rectify this perception, the Iraqi state must be careful not to make half-hearted concessions that are later exposed for all their emptiness and insincerities. Negotiating with elements of society that hold grievances against the state is not the place for quick fixes and silver bullets, it is the terrain of engaged diplomacy and sustained reconciliation. In this process it is also critical to be sensitive to difference and the deep fissures that exist within many of Iraq’s communities. As just one example, the Sunni Arab tribes of central and western Iraq cannot be reduced to a monolithic entity with a common set of grievances or allegiances. Like every component of Iraqi society, they are constituted by myriad relations with the state and are informed by a combination of stated desires and ever-shifting realities. Finally, meeting the violence of ISIS with unwieldy and unpredictable forms of state-sanctioned violence will only exacerbate the conflict. While a coherent military solution is needed to oust the ‘Islamic State’, this must be done by a unified national military who are perceived to fight on behalf of the Iraqi people rather 287

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than ethno-nationalist separatists, sectarian militias or, worse still, those who owe their allegiance to regional powerhouses. The central purpose of this volume has therefore been to demonstrate that any effort to manage the future of Iraq’s complex state–society relations must pay attention to the longue durée; to learn lessons from the complex and contested past of this deeply troubled nation. The final key theme that emerges from this volume is that the persecution of one citizen by the state is not just an attack on an individual’s civil liberties, just as a violent pogrom against a particular ethno-religious enclave is not just an attack on that group – both are attacks on the very notion of Iraqi citizenship. When innocent Iraqis have been arrested and tortured, fired upon as they protested against government decisions, oppressed and coerced into complicity by a foreign power or violent dictatorship – so too has the entire notion of what it meant to be an ‘Iraqi’. It is undoubtable that certain groups have been persecuted at certain times: the Assyrian Christians at the Siemele massacres of 1933, the Iraqi Jews in their forced exodus of the late 1940s and early 1950s; the Kurds during the brutal Anfal campaign of the late 1980s; the Shi‘a Arabs after the Intifada of 1991; the Sunni Arabs under the dictatorial regime of al-Maliki; the Yazidis at the hands of ISIS. All too often, however, such events are framed in terms of ‘Group A attacked Group B’, which has led to narratives of persecution, retribution and violent revenge. What is missed in such simplistic and reductive accounts is that each of these horrors is not just a scar on the targeted individual and their community but on the entire Iraqi people. To inculcate and then possibly overcome this shared sense of suffering, Iraqi state–society relations urgently needs a robust and sensitive process in which the traumas of the past are openly and honestly engaged with. This would serve as but one antidote to ongoing chaos and a critical first step towards mending state– society relations and creating a united and cohesive Iraq; a modern, peaceful, multicultural state where all citizens are free to live in peace despite their ethnicity, religion or political leanings.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), National Defense University, Washington, DC. SH-SHTP-A-001-167, 24 July 1986. ‘General Military Intelligence Directorate (GMID) studies on the foundation of the Dawah Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution Party’, SH-GMID-D-000-622, March–December 1995. Dorothy Van Ess Papers (DVEP), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1966–75). 78-M124, folder 32, ‘Pioneers in the Arab world’, revised draft. file 33, ‘The American Mission School for Boys, Basrah Iraq’, 1953. Gertrude Bell Archive, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Gertrude Bell, letter to her father, 23 February 1911. Great Britain, Colonial Office Special Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Progress of Iraq during the Period 1920–1931 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1931), pp. 158–9, 209–15. Available at http://www.llmcdigital.org/ default.aspx?redir=98096 (accessed 1 July 2014). Hoover Institution Archives USNSA, Box 221, ‘Yesterday and Today, Students of Iraq’. USNSA, Box 221, ‘The Iraqi student’, Published by GUIS 1/1, June 1959. USNSA, Box 221, ‘Notes on Iraq by Bill Lee (USNSA representative in Paris)’, February 1961. USNSA, Box 221, ‘Memorandum on the Iraqi situation’, August 1962 Iraqi Communist Party, Iraqi Letter, 2–3 (February–March 1962). League of Nations Archive ‘British Mandate for Mesopotamia:  report on Iraq administration October 1920–March 1922’, R.58. 30195, 17509. Communication from the Government of Iraq, C.296.M.172.1938.VII, ‘Report on the economic conditions of the Assyrians in the Northern Provinces in Iraq’, Geneva, 10 September 1938, pp. 1–31. The National Archives (TNA), Kew AIR 20/7266, ‘Memorandum, Assyrians in the Ba‘qubah Refugee Camp’, 11 August 1919. AIR 20/7266, ‘Memorandum, tools and seed corn, and other farming materials’, 15 August 1919. British Embassy, High Commission and Consulate, ‘Iraq: correspondence: situation reports (political officers), Part I, ‘Political reports on situation in Iraq’, 1941. FO 371/5126, ‘Leadership of the Assyrian People, and Settlement of the Community’, November 1920. FO 371/5127, ‘Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian refugees: at present in camp at Ba’quba Mesopotamia: Appendix C Statistics’.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY FO 371/8998. FO 371/40044/E700/42/93, 6 January 1944. FO 371/141086, British Embassy (Baghdad) to Foreign Office (London), 11 May 1959. FO 371/141086, British Embassy (Baghdad) to Eastern Department, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 26 February 1959. FO 371/141087, Home Office (London) to Foreign Office (London). London, 2 October 1959. FO 371/170428/1016/1/63, 5 January 1963. FO 371/170428/1016/4/63, 8 January 1963. FO 371/170428/EQ1015/14, Memorandum written after discussion with Iraqi students, by Prof. E.F. Penrose, 17 January 1963. FO 371/170428/EQ1015/15, Pamphlet issued by the Ba‘th Party in Baghdad, 8 January 1963. FO 371/170428/EQ1015/15, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 15 January 1963. FO 371/170429/EQ1015/21, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 22 January 1963. FO 371/170428/EQ1015/24, R.W. Munro, British Embassy (Baghdad) to D.L.N. Goodchild, Foreign Office (London). Baghdad, 29 January 1963. The Iraq Government Gazette, No. 39, 29 September 1929, CO 813/3. ———, No. 47, 24 November 1935, CO 813/9. ———, No. 45, 9 November 1941, CO 813/16. ———, No. 45, 10 November 1946, CO 813/22. National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA, College Park), 787.5/4–2655. Despatch No. 522, Gallman to Department of State, Baghdad, 26 April 1955. United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Commission on Human Rights, ‘Report on the situation of human rights in Iraq’, prepared by Max van der Stoel, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, in Accordance with Commission 1991/74, 18 February 1992. Wikileaks Department of State to Iran Tehran, Lebanon Beirut, ‘Request for Aid to Assyrians’, 9 May 1974. US Intelligence Baghdad, Iraq to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, ‘Deterioration of government of Iraq–Kurdish relations’, 26 August 1973. US Intelligence Baghdad, Iraq to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, ‘Kurdish Conflict’, 28 August 1973.

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Index Abadi, Haider al- 5, 254, 262, 275 ‘Abbasids 3, 179–80, 182, 188, 191 Abdalla, Amer 135, 147 Abu-Ghraib detention centre 77, 80, 83, 268 access to education 98 to government authority 103 to healthcare 38 to the media 139, 179 to oil revenues 100 to patronage 245 to political literature 139 accountability 2, 239 Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) 249, 264, 272 activism 74–7, 80, 84 student 17, 135–55, 137 Aflaq, Michel 180, 186 Ahali Group, 74, 123–4, 126 Ahmed, Ibrahim 220, 221 Akrawi, Matta 98–9 Al Qaeda 1, 236n.20, 243, 262, 263, 267, 268 Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) 7, 245–6, 267–8, 270, 271 Al-Hilla 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78 Al-Iraqiyya see political parties and coalitions, Iraqi National Movement (INM) Al-Nahdha Party 114 Algeria 35, 135, 145 Algiers Agreement 157, 158, 167, 169, 170, 172

Ali, Rashid 119, 125 Allawi, Ayad 240–1, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 258n.49, 262, 273 Alusi, Mithal al- 272 Alwani, Ahmed al- 270 American University of Beirut (AUB) 98, 99, 162 Ammash, Salih Mahdi 126 Anbar 245, 251, 252, 263, 266, 268, 269–71, 273 awakening see also Sahwa Councils 246, 267, 273 Anbar Provincial Council 274 Andrews, Sam 162 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty 57, 126 Ankara 217, 244, 250, 263 Arab Revolt 113 Arab–Israeli war (1948) 126 Arif, Abd al-Salam 127, 141, 146, 178 Arif, Ismail 126 armed forces 9, 110, 111, 112, 120, 122, 128, 254, 272, 274 Armenians 10, 19, 31–45 Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order (JRTN) 266, 267, 269 Askari, Jafar al- 94, 114 Assad, Bashar al- 268 Assembly of Syriac Language 160 Assyrian Cultural Club 160, 162, 164 Mordinna Atouraya 160, 162–6 Assyrian National Committee 32, 43, 45

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INDEX Assyrian Universal Alliance 159, 162 Assyrians 10, 17, 19, 22, 26n.8, 31–46, 119, 121, 124, 125, 128, 156–76, 241, 252, 283, 284, 285, 288 atheism 178, 181, 182–5, 196n.41 Austin, H.H. 35, 40, 41 autonomy 23, 114, 137, 146, 157, 159, 167, 170, 198, 221, 222, 223, 225–6, 227, 233, 234, 239, 246, 256n.3 Ayubi, Nazih 15 ‘Aziz, Husayn Qasim al- 183, 189, 190 ‘Aziz, Tariq 205 Ba‘th, Ba‘thism/Ba‘thist 1, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20–4, 52, 70, 137, 144, 149, 151, 156–76, 177–96, 197–214, 221, 222, 223, 241, 242, 243, 260, 261, 264–7, 269, 283, 284, 285, 286 Baba, Ammo 160 Babikiyya-Kharamiyya revolt  188–91 Bacon, Francis 187 Badr Brigades 244 Baghdad 2, 3, 8, 9, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26n.6, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40–1, 42, 45, 46, 50–68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 87n.37, 88n.61, 91, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 113, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 127, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 172, 178, 179, 184, 186, 193, 209, 217, 221, 222, 226, 228, 229–32, 233, 234, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 261, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 275, 283, 284, 286, 287 International Zone 287 Baghdadi, al-Khatib al- 52, 190

Bakr, Ahmad Hasan al- 122, 126, 159, 160 Banna, Hasan al- 4 Ba‘qubah refugee camp 19, 31–49, 284 Barazani, Shaykh Mahmud 120 Barzani, Idris 223 Barzani, Massoud 232, 233, 234, 253 Barzani, Mustafa 156, 159, 161, 166–8, 220–3, 224, 231, 234 Barzinji, Mahmoud 219 Bashkin, Orit 112, 115 Basra 3, 9, 19, 50, 53, 60, 91, 96, 146, 205, 226, 231, 233, 247, 257n.25 Batatu, Hanna 13, 53–5, 59, 88n.63, 112, 142 Bazzaz, Abd al Rahman 221 Bet-Shmuel, Shlimon 164–5, 166 Bolani, Jawad al- 249 Bowman, Humphrey 92, 93 Brahimi, Lakhdar 243 Britain/British 2, 8, 16, 19, 20, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–7, 38–9, 40, 41, 42, 43–4, 45–6, 50, 51, 54–7, 58, 62–3, 64, 73, 74–5, 77, 90–5, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 109, 110, 113–14, 116, 117–18, 119, 121, 124, 125–6, 128, 139, 140, 141, 161, 173n.17, 219, 260, 280, 282–3 British Mandate 2, 32, 34, 35, 44–5, 46, 50, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 93, 94, 97, 113, 115, 139, 158, 173n.17 British Military Mission 125 bureaucracy 8, 13, 22, 90, 91, 92, 94–7, 102, 110 Bush, George W. 242 Cairo 55, 70, 79 Castle, Barbara 58–9 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 149 Chadirchi, Kamil al- 80

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INDEX Chalabi, Abdul Hussein 95 Chalabi, Ahmed 241, 249 Chaldeans 10, 157 Chemical Ali see Majid, Ali Hassan alCheney, Dick 242 Chikko, Gewargis 167 Chikko, Hurmiz Malik 167 Christian Army of Revenge 41–2, 44 civil servants 61, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102 civil society 13, 17, 20, 21, 24, 50, 56, 111, 197, 281, 286 movements/organisations 18, 160, 218, 224 civil war 7, 11, 23, 156, 157, 224, 230, 231, 239, 261, 268, 274 co-optation 21, 198, 199– 204, 238, 254, 285 coalition 10, 22–3, 123, 156, 238–42, 245–54, 257n.25, 261, 262, 267–8, 275, 282 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) 240, 243–4, 248 Cold War 111 communism/communist 70, 71, 73, 76, 80, 82, 83, 88n.63, 102, 136, 140, 142–4, 146–9, 150, 167, 171, 177, 178, 179, 189, 190, 194n.3 conscription 56, 97, 98, 110, 111, 114, 119–21, 122, 128 consociationalism 226, 236n.20, 239, 256n.3 Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) 246 corruption 5, 23, 24, 225, 227, 251,  285 Council of Representatives (COR) 244 coup d’état 111, 141, 149, 151, 157, 178, 181, 197, 221, 255 see also revolution, Iraqi

Cox, Sir Percy 40 cruelty 12, 24, 82, 84, 128 Damascus 6n.4, 55, 61, 113, 116, 118, 122, 168, 170, 178, 180, 245 Davidson, Randall, Archbishop of Canterbury 41 Dawisha, Adeed 14, 248 de-Ba‘thification 22, 24, 249, 261, 263, 264, 265, 272, 276 democracy 7, 14, 22, 23, 142, 143, 238, 254, 255, 260, 261, 287 demonstrations 73, 74, 77, 83, 84, 136, 138, 139, 140, 179, 190, 199, 231 student 78–81, 144, 148 discrimination 262, 265 Diyala 34, 244, 245, 247, 251, 253, 263, 266, 271 Dohuk 169, 218 Douri, Izzat Ibrahim al- 200, 208, 266 Doxiadis, Constantinos A. 56 Durubi, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Ghani al- 52 education 1, 18, 19, 20, 39, 63, 90–108, 110, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 128, 136, 137, 138–41, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152n.8, 168, 282 higher 92, 94, 97, 100, 120, 137, 138, 142, 144, 146, 150 military 92, 98, 117, 122 effendiyya 92, 97, 101, 139 Egypt 69, 77, 93, 126, 127, 135, 137, 142, 143, 149, 189, 268 elites ethnic 243, 250, 253, 254 Kurdish 224, 230, 236n.20 military 112, 122–3

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INDEX elites (cont.) nationalist 22, 115, 135, 141, 142, 150 party 230, 239, 247, 255 political 11, 19, 23, 109, 111, 112, 113, 119, 120, 127–8, 141, 236n.20, 260, 261, 262, 265, 272, 275 religious 250, 253 ruling 251, 252, 277n.8, 280, 285 Erbil 217–18, 222, 229–34, 236n.20, 263, 275, 283 Eshai, Mar Shimun 37, 39, 40, 158, 159, 165, 172n.6 ethnic cleansing 171, 174n.22 groups 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 32, 39, 51, 60, 61, 62, 64, 110, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 145, 158, 160, 172, 219, 239, 240, 241, 243, 249, 250, 253, 254, 260, 281, 283, 288 Europe 111, 157, 187 European Parliament 274 Fallujah 227, 263, 264, 267, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 287 Farman, ‘Sa’a 12, 69, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82 Farman, Ghaib Tuma 20, 69–89 Farnas, ‘Abbas bin 186 Farouk-Sluglett, Marion 4 fascism/fascist 97, 98, 117, 125, 144 fatwa 207, 208, 210, 243 Fawzi, Faruq ‘Umar 189–92 Faysal, Ghazi bin 118, 124 Faysal I 19, 56, 83, 111, 113, 116, 118, 122 Faysal II 57, 77 federalism/federalist 218, 224, 225–6, 234, 236n.20, 248, 254

France/French 8, 31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 62, 77, 109, 113, 115, 116, 118, 136, 161 Free Officers movement 126–7, 141, 142 futuwwa 99, 117, 125 Gaylani, Rashid Ali al- see Ali, Rashid gender 10, 17, 26n.8, 38, 99, 117, 141 General Military Council for Iraq Revolutionaries (GMCIR) 267 General Students’ Federation 143 General Union of Iraqi Students (GUIS) 139–40, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149 genocide 31, 44, 165, 223, 274 Gorran (‘Change’) movement 23, 26n.6, 227, 248, 249, 252 government of Iraq 217, 218, 233 Gropius, Walter 56–7 Gulf War 1991 9, 23, 198, 205 Habash, George 181 Hadid, Muhammad 58–9, 123, 126 Hajj, ‘Aziz al- 81, 83, 88n.60 Hakim, Ammar al- 248, 249, 251, 253 Hakim, Mahdi al- 200 Hakim, Muhsin al- 200, 247 Hanafiyah, Muhammad bin al- 192 Hashim, Mahdi 126 Hashimi, Tariq al- 231, 249, 258n.50, 262–3 Hashimi, Yasin al- 94, 123–4, 125 hawza (religious seminary) 21, 26n.6, 200–3, 205, 206–7, 211, 283 hegemony 14, 15, 17, 20, 144, 151 Heskel, Sasson 95 Higher Institutes Students’ Committee 140 historiography 7–28, 52, 177–96, 198

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INDEX history 4, 8, 13, 16, 18, 24, 26n.8, 51–3, 54, 58, 59, 64, 69, 80, 93, 99, 112, 115, 123, 135, 143, 144, 158, 165, 168, 171, 177, 179, 180, 182–5, 186, 188, 189, 193, 193n.2, 231, 234, 255, 281, 282, 285 Hobbes, Thomas 12–13 Horowitz, Donald 239 Huda, Bint al- 200 Huntington, Samuel P. 111 Husayn, Ibrahim 127 Husayn, Saddam 1, 5n.3, 9, 11, 13, 21, 74, 79, 88n.61, 91, 180, 181, 186, 192, 196n.41, 197–8, 199–201, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228–9, 231, 232, 234, 242, 243, 246, 247, 260, 266, 267, 283 Husayn, Sharif 113, 118, 127 Husayn, Tawfiq 117–18 Husri, Sati al- 93–4, 95–7, 99, 100, 101, 116–8, 119, 123, 126, 135, 139 Hussein, Saddam see Husayn, Saddam identity 9–10, 17, 55, 61, 81, 110, 123, 169, 239, 255 ethnic 219, 239 group/collective 5, 17, 25, 55, 56, 60, 61, 64, 241 national 9, 14, 15, 51, 97, 115, 128, 150, 173n.14 ideology 8, 14, 20, 21, 52, 55, 57, 73, 80, 99, 110, 115, 116, 125, 127, 179, 180, 220, 268, 274, 285 Idrisi, Muhammed al- 186 independence Assyrian 39, 46, 170

Iraqi 20, 45, 57, 92, 94, 99, 100, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 135, 141 Kurdish 9, 25, 220, 223, 224, 227, 228, 234 religious 198, 200, 201, 203 Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) 18, 24, 249, 251, 272 indoctrination 21, 202, 204 intellectuals 14, 15, 18, 21, 59, 70, 71, 72, 77, 80, 84, 110, 115, 117, 123, 137, 142, 143, 150, 158, 162, 173n.20, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186, 192, 193, 194n.4, 219, 248, 281, 285 International Union of Students (IUS) 145, 147, 148 Intifada (1952) 20, 72, 77, 79, 80, 83, 87n.37, 88n.63, 136, 138, 140, 286 Intifada (1991) 288 invasion of Iraq 1, 3, 4, 5, 128, 238, 241 of Kuwait 223 Iran 2, 3, 6n.7, 33, 39, 112, 113, 157, 159, 161, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173n.11, 177, 192, 201, 217, 220, 222, 223, 224, 234, 235, 267, 275 Iran–Iraq War 3, 8n.7, 112, 177, 187, 198, 199, 200, 205, 257 Iraq Levies Force 38, 43, 45, 46, 119, 173n.17 Liberation Act 1988 242 Petroleum Company (IPC) 51, 55, 56, 62, 63, 173n.12 Iraqi Army 22, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 141, 163, 165, 166, 228, 231, 247, 269

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INDEX Iraqi (cont.) Governing Council (IGC) 240, 243 Military College 92, 113, 117 National Accord 241 National Congress (INC) 225, 241 Security Force (ISF) 232, 264–7, 269–74, 287 Students’ Society 144 Teachers Association 102 Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation 157 Islam, Ansar al- 267 Islam/Islamism 8, 18, 177–96, 202, 203, 210, 284, 285, 287 medieval 177–96 ‘Islamic State’ 1, 2, 3, 5, 6n10, 8, 226, 233, 260–79, 287 in Iraq (ISI) 268 of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 7–10, 11, 24, 25, 218, 228–34, 251, 252, 253–4, 261, 264, 266, 267–9, 270–72, 274–6, 277n.8, 287, 288 Israel 77, 91, 112, 126, 161, 166, 167, 179, 210 Issawi, Rafi al- 231, 263, 272 Jaafari, Ibrahim al- 230, 241, 244, 247, 249, 259n.60 Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan 4 Jamali, Fadil al- 135 Jasim, ‘Aziz al-Sayyid 181 Jawahiri, Muhammad Mahdi al- 80, 96–7 Jawzi, Ibn al- 190 Jews 10, 125, 288 jihadism/jihadist 8, 235, 261, 268, 275 Jindo, Odisho 162 Jordan 4, 179, 263 justice 78, 191, 192 social 100, 141–5, 189

Kadhim, Abbas 208, 214n.55 Kambar, Malik 42–3 Karim, Mahdi ‘Abd al- 143 Kharami, Babik al- 190–1 Khoury, Dina R. 16, 17, 52, 53, 54, 55, 112 Khusbak, ‘A’wam al-ru’b’ 69, 72–3, 74–6, 78, 81 Khusbak, al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-’Iraq 79–80, 88n.63 Khusbak, Shakir 20, 69–89 Kienle, Eberhard 4, 6n.8 Kirkuk 9, 19, 23, 50–68, 119, 147, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 222, 230–3, 245, 247, 251, 252, 253, 269, 283 Kishtaini, Khalid al- 101 Kissinger, Henry 161 Kristol, William 242 Kubba, Muhammad Mahdi 123 Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) 2, 217, 224, 225, 226, 231, 232, 236n.20, 247, 248, 250, 285 Kurdistan 2, 9, 248 1st Republic 220, 230, 235, 235n.3 2nd Republic 218 invasion of 1 Iranian 145 Iraqi 2, 9, 217–37, 241, 248 Islamic Group 244 National Parliament (KNA) 244 Turkish 145 Kurdistan Region (KR) 23, 217–37, 241, 261, 263, 275 see also Kurdistan Kurds 2, 3, 9, 17, 22, 23, 26n.6, 26n.8, 61–2, 109, 110, 114, 119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 143, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 200, 217, 219–37, 241, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252, 254, 257n.22, 283–4, 288

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INDEX language 22, 53, 60, 61, 77, 115–6, 157, 158, 160, 162–4, 168, 172, 203 Arabic 99, 115 Assyrian 160–1 Assyrian-Aramaic 160, 164, 173n.11 Kurdish 157 Syriac 157, 159, 163, 173n.11 Turkish 61, 62, 173n.11 Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators (1933) 58 League of Nations 31, 33, 45, 110, 120, 219 Lebanon 3, 91, 118, 170, 173n.11 legitimacy 2, 3, 8, 40, 115, 137, 145, 150, 218, 224, 233, 286 Libby, Lewis 242 Libya 268 Lijphart, Arend 239, 256n.3 Lipset, Seymour Martin 135 literature 15, 25, 51–3, 55, 69, 71–2, 111, 112, 115, 163, 164, 172, 178, 197, 208, 217, 261, 286 Mahmud, Nur al-Din 80 Majid, Ali Hassan al- 200 Makiya, Kanan 13 Maliki, Nouri al- 5, 11, 17, 23–5, 230–2, 245–50, 253–4, 257n.25, 261, 262–5, 268–70, 272, 273, 275, 286, 288 Mandeans 241 Manna, Abd al- Razzaq al- 186 Maqdisi, al- 190 March Agreement (1970) 221, 222 marginalisation 22, 24, 62, 121, 125, 205, 219, 260, 262, 263, 265–6, 272, 282, 283, 286 Marinetti, Filippo 117 Marwakil, Mīkhā’īl 164 Marx, Karl 12–3

Marxism/Marxist 14, 21, 70, 168, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185–90, 192–3, 194n.4 Masoum, Fouad 253–4 massacres Assyrian 119, 121, 124–5 Simele 46, 158, 161, 163–4, 174n.30, 285, 288 Masudi, Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Hussain Ibn Ali al- 186 media 15, 17, 110, 115, 117, 143, 227 magazines 70, 140, 159, 160, 178–81, 187, 190, 193, 194n.3, 284 newspapers 140, 143, 147, 149, 162, 178–85, 193, 196n.41 print 57, 112, 117, 121, 169 Mesopotamia 15, 138, 193, 219 Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) 240 Migdal, Joel 16, 64, 146 migration, rural-to-urban 50, 54, 58, 62, 92, 123, 156, 173n.12 militarism 97, 99, 110, 112, 117, 120, 121, 126 military administration 34, 41, 91 leaders 40, 44, 45 occupation 7, 42, 91, 232, 261 regimes 36, 103, 221, 229 service 97–8, 114 military–society relations 109–32 minorities ethnic 10, 20, 45, 110, 119, 143, 156, 252, 283, 284 religious 10, 20, 111, 156, 158, 283 modernisation 13, 56, 57, 138–41 theories 13, 56, 57, 111 modernity 13, 51, 142, 185 Mohammed, Qazi 220, 235n.3

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INDEX monarchy 1, 2, 5n.1, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69–70, 72, 73, 77, 84, 87n.36, 90, 100, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113–14, 115, 116, 120, 121, 126, 127–9, 142, 143, 144, 149, 150, 163, 174n.30, 178, 220, 280, 286 Hashemite 19, 20, 50, 64, 90–1, 99, 111, 114, 188 Morocco 4, 135 Mosul 3, 7, 10, 19, 32, 39, 50, 60, 61, 91, 98, 99, 119, 120, 122, 123, 146, 161, 170, 219, 232, 233, 246, 252, 254, 264, 267, 274, 287 Moustafa, Tamir 146 Mubarak, Muhammad 182, 183–4 Muhammad, Abd Allah Ahmad 186 Mujahedeen Army 267 Mukhlis, Mawlud 122 Mulla, Haider al- 272 Musawi, Muhsin al- 74, 77 music 161, 164, 284 Muslim Brotherhood 4 Mustafa, Nawshirwan 227 Mustapha, Kateab al- 267 Muthanna Club 123, 125, 126 Mutlaq, Saleh al- 245, 247, 249, 251, 252, 253, 264, 265, 273 Nādī al-Riyādhī a ml-Athūrī/ Nādi al-Tamouz (Assyrian Sports Club) 160 Najaf 21, 52, 53, 60, 202, 204, 205, 206, 214n.67, 251 Nasir, Jamal ‘Abd al- see Nasser, Gamal Abd alNasiriyah 241, 242 Nasser, Gamal Abd al- 127, 137, 142, 144, 146, 178 National Guard 112, 254 National Patriotic Front 157

National Union of Iraqi Students (NUIS) 147, 149 nationalism 3, 5, 20, 45, 46, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 91, 92, 93, 99, 109, 110, 114, 115–19, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135–6, 137, 138–41, 142, 147, 148, 149, 166, 168, 177, 178–9, 185, 219, 220, 226, 231, 239, 247, 250, 266, 283, 285, 288 networks 5, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 60, 122–3, 127, 137, 138, 145, 227, 267 Newton, Isaac 186, 187 Nineveh/Ninewa 159, 160, 245, 246, 247, 250, 251–3, 263, 266, 271 Nujaifi, Osama al- 246, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 265, 273 Nusra, Jabhat al- 268 Nuwas, Abu 184 Obama, Barack 250, 261 occupation British 2, 37, 74, 91, 280 French 42 US-led 7, 11, 261, 267 oil 2, 3, 23, 50, 57, 59, 60, 149, 233–4, 253 agreements and exports 217–18, 232 exploration and production 62, 233 interests and companies 62, 200 price 2, 5, 5n.2, 234 revenues 56–7, 100 Ojaili, Abd Diab al- 272 Olsen, Pelle Valentin 57 oppression 12, 13, 21, 81, 128, 179, 190, 284 Ottoman Empire 2–3, 6n.7, 8, 9, 19, 31, 33, 42, 52–5, 60, 61, 74, 91, 92, 113–14, 138, 152n.8, 175n.51

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INDEX Pakistan 3, 4 Palestine 118, 139, 181 Palestine Mandate 118 pan-Arabism 3, 93, 109, 110, 115–16, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124–5, 126, 127–8, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 178, 196n.41, 266, 285 Parhad, Sam 43 patrimony/patrimonialism 13–4, 15, 17, 122, 127 patriotism 15, 21, 117, 135, 140, 143, 209, 221 patrons 14, 123 Peace Partisan and Democratic Youth 140 Perlmutter, Amos 111 persecution 20, 69, 71, 73, 84, 163, 283, 284, 288 peshmerga 9, 222, 233, 253 Petros, General Agha 32–3, 40–6 poetry 15, 40, 164, 169, 184, 284 police 46, 63, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81–3, 140, 162, 200, 213n.33 political parties and coalitions Al-Hadba, 246, 247, 249, 250 Assyrian Democratic Movement 241 Ba‘th Socialist Party 20, 157, 160, 177, 181, 185, 187, 194n.4, 197, 199, 200, 206, 210 Citizens Alliance 251 Dawa /Dawa Party 199–200, 241, 244, 245, 247, 254, 257n.25 Fadhila 244, 247 Hiwar 245, 247, 249 Intellectuals and Tribes 248 Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) 20, 51, 62, 70, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81,

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88n.60, 101, 126–7, 140, 142–3, 146–8, 150, 157, 161, 166, 178, 194n.4, 286 Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) 244, 245, 248, 249, 253, 262, 263 Iraqi National Alliance (INA) 248, 249 Iraqi National Movement (INM) (Al-Iraqiyya) 231, 249, 262, 263, 265, 270, 272, 273 Iraqi Turkmen Front 241 Iraqis 244, 245 Iraqiyah List 244, 245, 251–2 Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) 241, 246, 247, 248, 252 Kurdish Communists 244 Kurdistan Alliance 249 Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) 23, 26n.6, 142, 146, 157, 161, 166–7, 168, 220, 223, 224, 227, 233, 234, 236n.20, 241, 244, 247, 252, 285 Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) 227, 244, 245, 249, 252 Mutahidun/Mutahidoun (United) 251–2, 265, 272, 273 National Democratic Party (NDP) 80, 126, 142, 149, 244 National Party 74 National Reform Trend 247 Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) 23, 26n.6, 168, 223, 224, 227, 233, 234, 236n.20, 241, 244, 252, 253, 285 State of Law (SOL) 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 257n.25, 264 Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) 244, 247, 257n.22 Tawafuq 245, 248, 249, 252, 258n.50 Turkmen Iraqi Front 244

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INDEX political parties and coalitions (cont.) United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) 244, 245, 248 Unity Alliance of Iraq 249 Polos, Mar Shimun 36, 38, 39 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 181 Popular Resistance Force 147 Portsmouth Treaty 140 poverty 22, 58 power relations 13, 64 propaganda 21, 169, 182, 204

Revolutionary Command Council 160, 166, 266 Rey, Matthieu 138 rhetoric 12, 24, 114, 220, 231, 232, 261, 266, 270, 272 Rifa’i, Rafi al- 274 Royal Iraqi Air Force 109, 120–1, 140 Rusafi, Maʿruf al- 54

Qasim, Abd al-Karim 135–55, 156, 178, 221, 285, 286 Qur’an 185, 187, 203, 204 Rahman, Sami Abdul 222, 236n.20 Ramadi 264, 267, 269, 270, 271, 287 Rashid, Caliph Harun al- 184 Rawi, Ibrahim al- 122 rebellion 54, 72, 92, 97, 168 Kurdish 22, 121, 162, 217, 229 see also uprisings refugees 10, 31–49, 253 religious groups and affiliation 11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 32, 96, 145, 164, 172, 241, 255, 281, 284 Christian 10, 19, 22, 26n.8, 119, 122, 128, 157, 168, 170, 171, 175n.51, 186, 209, 252, 283, 284, 288 Muslim 31, 92, 113, 125, 186, 187, 188, 210, 245 see also Sunni, Shi‘a religious institutions 18, 168, 197–214, 281 revolution Ba‘th 221 Iranian 3, 199 Iraqi (1958) 1, 5n.1, 20, 58, 59, 62, 127–9, 141, 142, 146, 160, 221, 285

Sabbagh, Salah al-Din al- 118, 123, 124–5, 128 Sadr, Muhammad Baqir al- 200, 209 Sadr, Muhammad Sadiq al- 206–8, 210, 214n.55, 249 Sadr, Muqtada al- 210, 231, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 264 Sadrist 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253 Safa, al-Mas’udi Ikha al- 186 Sahwa Councils 245, 246, 248 see also Anbar awakening Said, Fahmi 118 Said, Nuri al- 75, 77, 78, 87n.36, 125, 128, 140, 141 Salafism/Salafist 8, 267 Salahadin/Salah Adin/Saladin 225, 247, 251, 263, 271 Salih, Khaled 112 Salman, Abd Ali 184 Salman, Mahmud 118 Samarra’i, Abd al-Khaliq al- 181, 189 Samir, Faysal al- 186–7 sanctions 1, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul 72 SAVAK 166 schools 6, 35, 61, 77, 79, 81, 91, 92–3, 96–101, 116, 139, 142, 152n.8, 159, 160, 168, 202, 211 religious 93, 203, 204

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INDEX secondary 61, 73, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 137, 144, 147, 159 Scientific Iraqi Academy 160 sectarianism/sectarianist 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 17, 23, 24, 25, 51, 61, 81, 84, 90, 95, 96, 97, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 136, 199, 230, 231, 241, 246, 247, 248, 260–5, 268, 269, 272, 284, 288 secularism/secularist 5, 21, 26n.6, 81, 84, 138, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185, 192, 239, 241, 247, 248, 249, 252, 254, 262, 273 separatism 10, 18, 24, 284, 288 Shabib, Kamil 118 Shahristani, Hussein al- 264 Shanshul, Falah Hasan al- 264 Sharia law 8, 271 Shawkat, Sami 99, 116–17, 118, 123, 126, 135 Shawwaf, Abd al-Wahab al- 146 Shi‘a 3, 5, 6n.7, 7, 9, 11, 21, 23, 26n.6, 73, 74, 77, 81, 95, 97, 113, 114, 115, 120, 122, 123, 126, 168, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181–2, 183, 184, 188– 91, 192, 193, 197–214, 230, 234, 235, 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 257n.22, 257n.25, 260, 261, 262, 265, 266, 267, 268, 272, 274, 275, 277n.8, 283, 284, 286, 288 Sidqi, Bakr 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 174n.30 Sina, Ibn (Avicenna) 186 Sistani, Ali al- 210, 243, 247, 253 Six Day War 1967 179 Sluglett, Peter 16, 114 social injustice 70, 71, 74 socialism/socialist 55, 71, 173n.20, 179, 180, 181, 185, 190, 266, 285

Somekh, Sassoon 101–2 Soviet Union 71, 161 stability 7, 97, 116, 217, 218, 233, 254, 256n.3, 282 strikes 51, 62–3, 78, 81, 82, 84, 88n.63, 138, 140, 147–9, 151 students 21, 73, 78, 79–81, 84, 88n.63, 93, 96–101, 116–18, 135, 136–51, 201–3, 206, 207, 286 Students and Youth Solidarity Day  145 Sulayman, Hikmat 123–4, 125 Suleimaniyah 218, 219 Sunni 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 9, 16, 19, 20, 22–5, 26n.6, 73, 97, 113, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123, 126, 127, 177, 179, 180, 182, 188, 189, 191, 198, 209, 230, 231, 232, 234–5, 240, 243, 244–6, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253–4, 255, 260–76, 277n.8, 283, 284, 286–7, 288 suppression 20, 21, 77, 112, 121, 124, 165, 206, 219, 264, 267, 268, 276 Surma Mar Shimun 39–43 Sykes–Picot Agreement 8–9 Syria 4, 7, 31, 42–3, 109, 113, 116, 118, 122, 127, 128, 161, 173n.11, 189, 220, 223, 263, 268, 270, 271, 274, 275 Talabani, Jalal 168, 220, 221, 222, 224, 227, 234, 250, 253 Tarbush, Mohammad 112 teachers 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 117, 144, 179, 182, 203, 206 Teachers College Columbia 98 Tehran 187, 204, 222, 247 terrorism 7, 231, 261, 262, 264, 270

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INDEX Thaqafi, Al-Mukhtar al- 191–2 Tikrit 7, 264, 267, 274, 287 Timman, Ja’far Abu al- 74, 80–1 trade unions 4, 17, 102, 124, 140, 142, 143 Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) 2004 229 tribes/tribalism 10, 12, 13, 14, 16–20, 22, 33–7, 38–41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 53, 54, 60, 96, 98, 109, 110, 111, 114, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 156, 161, 168, 170, 172n.4, 179, 184, 189, 191, 219, 220, 238, 240–1, 243, 245, 246, 248, 251, 254, 266–7, 270, 271, 273, 281, 284, 287 Tripp, Charles 5n.3, 14 Tufayl, Ibn (Abu Bakr Muhammad) 186 Tunisia 135, 268 Turk, Ismail Fattah 184 Turkey 2, 113, 121, 124, 151, 169, 170, 172n.4, 217, 219, 220, 223, 224, 233, 234, 235, 250, 263 Turkmen 10, 61, 62, 122, 230, 241, 244, 252 Umayyads 179, 180, 182, 189, 191 unemployment 22, 24, 263 Union of Syriac Literates and Writers 160 United Kingdom 41, 91, 113, 125, 144 United Nations (UN) 230, 233, 243–4, 250, 274 United States of America (US) 1, 3, 7, 11, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 37, 63, 91, 111–12, 149, 159, 161, 166, 167, 193n.2, 210, 228, 229, 230, 240, 243, 246, 247, 248, 258n.50, 260–79, 280, 282, 283

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 161 University of Baghdad 57, 70, 137, 144, 146, 159, 160 uprisings 17, 138, 139, 141, 161, 190, 193, 205, 206, 261, 262, 264, 269 see also rebellion Kurdish 9, 121, 162 see also rebellion, Kurdish urban poor 19, 51, 58, 64 space 35, 50, 51, 54, 57 US invasion of Kuwait see invasion, of Iraq USSR 157 Vaughan, Megan 37 violence 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 42, 44, 51, 52, 55, 60, 61, 69, 75, 109, 110, 112, 121, 129, 140, 161, 166, 198, 199, 200, 206, 207, 210, 231, 239, 242, 244, 247, 252, 255, 261, 262, 265, 268, 269, 270, 282, 284, 286, 287 Visions of Freedom 241 Wardi, Ali al- 13 Watenpaugh, Keith 31 Wathba 57, 60, 126, 138, 140 Weber, Max 12–13, 14 Wellhausen, Julius 192 Wien, Peter 112, 117 Wilson, Sir Anthony T. 40, 42 Wolfowitz, Paul 242 women 10, 26n.8, 38, 71, 82, 117, 140, 141, 148, 165, 170, 185, 187, 190, 242, 274 World War I 3, 4, 8, 19, 32, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 91, 94, 103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 121, 170, 173n.14, 174n.24, 219, 260

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INDEX World War II 20, 31, 87n.37, 99, 125, 151, 219, 220, 234 Wright, Frank Lloyd 57

Yawar, Ghazi 244 Yazidis 10, 120, 241, 252, 274, 288 Young Effendiyya 123

Yaqo, Malik 42, 158, 161–6, 172n.4, 174n.24 Yaqzan, Hayy bin 186

Zakiyya, Dhu al-Nafs al- 191 Zarqawi, Abu Musab al- 268 Zawahiri, Ayman al- 268

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