The political earthquake in Iraq

Having experienced the warmth and spontaneous hospitality of ordinary and unknown Iraqi people, and watched at close quarters their troubled lives under occupation in 2003, a few months after the US-led armed assault on Iraq had formally ended, and again in 2011, a chill goes down my spine watching the country ravaged once again, this time by the radical militant group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

With the US, the initiator of the current mess in Iraq, moving to the Gulf region its mammoth warship USS George HW Bush, with dozens of fighter jets, to explore military options should the situation in Iraq worsen, another violent crisis stares at the world.

With ISIS being active not only in Iraq, but also West Asia, particularly Syria, where it is regarded the most capable to fight President Bashar al-Assad, these startling developments are close enough to spook even the Indian equity markets. On Friday, the BSE Sensex, still in celebration mode over the Narendra Modi government’s arrival at the Centre, tanked with the Sensex losing 348 points. Monday wasn’t that bad, but one Iraqi city after another falling to the ISIS certainly seems to have halted our Dalal Street bull run.

If Al-Qaeda strikes terror in our hearts, the ISIS is much more ruthless with an army of suicide bombers at its command. Having controlled the Iraqi city of Fallujah for five months, it has now captured its second biggest city Mosul. Iraqi troops and people are fleeing to escape nothing short of decapitation; it might be a matter of days before Baghdad’s Shiite government falls to this extremist group, which is already holding 49 hostages, including the Turkish consul general in Mosul, somewhere in northern Iraq.

With the group led by Sunni militants snapping on the heels of Baghdad, some of the US embassy staff was evacuated and our MEA has issued an advisory against “unnecessary travel to Iraq”.

What is extremely chilling is the use of 21st century social media platforms by a terrorist group that endorses medieval ideology. Over the last few days ISIS has been posting on Twitter terrifying images of what it claims is the mass execution of Iraqi soldiers in Tikrit. Claiming the execution of 1,700 Iraqi troops, it has posted pictures of ISIS gunmen executing a long row of Iraqi soldiers lying in trenches. You certainly need a strong stomach to watch these images.

As these disturbing images surfaced — another image has several men captured alive and tightly packed one on top of the other in a pick-up truck being driven somewhere — discussions have been raging on Twitter over suspension of accounts associated with this brutal organisation.

One of the Twitter accounts, whose profile was titled ‘Soldiers of Iraq and the Levant’, last week posted a message which “thanked God” for Twitter so that mujahideen could now “share their joys and not have to listen to the BBC, al-Arabia, Al-Jazeera ( sic )”.

Even in October 2003, as the violent shootings, kidnappings, bomb blasts, frequent stopping of our vehicle and meticulous searches continued, there was a premonition of gloom and doom. The conversations I had with educated Iraqis, particularly women who had held well paying jobs — school teachers, bankers, executives and even business school professors — during the Saddam Hussein era but were now unemployed and living on a State dole, had agreed that the dictator needed to go.

“But not in this fashion, which leaves behind such a big confusion and mess as there isn’t a strong government in place,” a school teacher had rued in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

A few months later, it was heart -breaking to see Iraqis wait in long queues for oil that was their national wealth but was being shipped out of the country in huge tanker convoys.

The violence, bloodshed and anarchy in Iraq today, as the US is winding up its presence, has a direct link to the US-led invasion on it following 9/11. Of course, the pretext was a search for weapons of mass destruction. But surely, that war launched under the presidentship of George W Bush had more to do with oil and avenging Saddam for cocking a snook at the US when Bush senior was president.

Under Saddam, Iraq was a country with a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni dictator. True, Saddam was a tyrant, a dictator but not the only one in the world in general and the Islamic world in particular.

Saudi Arabia has a much more repressive regime, but its leader is wooed by the US. How Assad, another West Asian dictator, is clinging on to power, is there for the world to see. Irony of ironies, now the US is all set to commence a dialogue with Iran (remember that “axis of evil”?), taking up its offer to intervene in Iraq, under the guise of protecting that country’s Shias. But surely, Iran has its own geopolitical as well as regional agenda in making this offer.

The West Asian expert and the second most enthusiastic about assaulting Iraq, Britain’s then Prime Minister Tony Blair, continues to defend the 2003 assault on Iraq. He told the BBC: “Even if you’d left Saddam in place in 2003, then when 2011 happened, and you had the Arab revolutions going through Tunisia and Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt and Syria, you would have still had a major problem in Iraq. You can see what happens when you leave the dictator in place, as has happened with Assad now. The problems don’t go away.”

Well, the problems have multiplied manifold in Iraq. As the country continues to be ravaged in sectarian violence, with such massive destruction of life and property, one shudders to think of what is happening to the priceless Mesopotanian art and architecture that still remains.

Remember those powerful images when the US troops stood by and shrugged as looters devastated the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003, after the fall of the Saddam regime? Priceless artefacts were stolen and others that the marauders could not see much value in, simply thrown, broken or torn (ancient documents) to pieces.

But then who is responsible for the shadow of a once prosperous country. This tweet from Max Fisher, content director @VoxDot Com, has a point to make. “Maliki blames Sudis. Saudis blame Maliki. US liberals blame Bush, conservatives blame Obama. UK blames Blair. ISIS remains blameless.”