CAMP TAJI, Iraq - An Iraqi soldier enrolled in the Junior Leaders Course guards a door entry during squad live-fire training at Camp Taji, Iraq, Feb. 6, 2016. Simulated squad live-fire exercises train Iraqi soldiers on proper methods of engaging the enemy during the ongoing fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). By enabling Iraqi security forces through advise and assist and build partner capacity missions, the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve’s multinational Coalition is helping the Government of Iraq to set the conditions to defeat ISIL.
The intifada in Iraq, sparked by a string of failures by the government to tackle post-conflict Iraq’s crumbling economy, widespread corruption and human rights abuses, has pushed Prime Minister Mahdi into a corner. Protests have sprung up across cities and towns in Iraq including Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala (one of the Shia’s holiest cities) and the horrific responses by security forces which have followed in their wake have forced the political veteran to resign from his position.
The response by the Ministry of Interior including the deployment of the Emergency Response Divisions, and the use of Counter-Terrorism Services in an attempt to quell Iraqi activists and protesters - men and women demanding basic rights to functioning electricity and clean drinking water - has been utterly appalling. Over 400 protesters have been killed and over 10,000 wounded. Parts of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella of over 50 Shia paramilitaries, armies and militias, have also contributed to the bloodshed. Prime Minister Mahdi’s position in the continued crackdown has become untenable despite promises of reform.
Images and videos of the good and the bad of Iraq’s protests have spread across cyberspace, making a mockery of government efforts to enforce a nationwide blackout of the Internet and social media. Protesters have been singing and dancing in the streets, playing football and smoking shisha. The elderly distribute bread and join sit-downs and universities have shut down as young men and women, students studying, have joined protests.
In Tahrir Square, there is a carnival atmosphere with men, women and children wearing an assortment of masks, waving Iraq’s red, white and black flags, jumping and cheering and playing music. In one video, a cleric is seen tearing his robe to pieces for protesters so that the cloth will protect people from tear gas and smoke grenades. Food and juice are distributed by activists to quench the thirst and fuel the stomachs of ordinary Iraqis, providing the basics with the country’s political elite has failed to provide for decades. Fireworks and laser pointers are the response to the government’s curfew at night, as the laws imposed by security forces fall on deaf ears. The young and the old stand in relative unity from Mosul to Baghdad to Basra.
TukTuks rubble down the street with Iraqi flags attached to them, driving wounded to safe spaces for treatment and volunteers supporting emergency services to treat the wounded, and carry the dead from the scene. Tribute is paid to them in street art as a symbol of the protesters’ unity. “Our tuk-tuk drivers are in the fire, they help others. They are better than America and Iran together,” reads one drawing. Defying death and security forces brutality, despite internet cuts, road cuts and curfew, civil disobedience and strike have spread all over the country, led by students, workers, and professional unions. Police and military have joined protesters, some unable to continue to support the crackdown. Garish and colourful graffiti adorns street walls in central Baghdad around Tahrir Square as Iraqi street artists paint about their future hopes using #October as a slogan.
Tragedy and brutality have walked hand-in-hand with Iraq’s revolutionary atmosphere. Gunmen and snipers, masked or dressed in civilian clothing, have been shooting protesters from rooftops and in the street. Those who have been identified and caught have been badly beaten by activists. Blood pours from the bodies of those cut down by gunfire and tear gas grenades lodged in heads of the innocent emit smoke as nearby civilians attempt to put out the gas leaking from faces and fractured skulls with bags and flags. ERD vehicles fire at unarmed civilians and the pop and crackle of gunfire pierces the air. Cars have been filmed driving through crowds, smashing people to the ground and tossing them like rag-dolls. Students are beaten ferociously by truncheons. Soldiers and paramilitaries in khaki and plain clothing open fire on protesters at checkpoints and have massacred protesters in with impunity.
For two months, the protests have continued unabated, and as the crackdown on civilians in the street intensifies, the question “Where are you?” beautifully painted on one of the murals in Baghdad becomes increasingly relevant with each civilian death. Prosecutors in Sweden have opened investigations into whether Iraq’s defence minister, Najah al-Shammari, is responsible for committing crimes against humanity in the crackdown. Though it is difficult to identify the perpetrators, there is increasing evidence that paramilitary units and security forces have been using live ammunition on activists and protesters killing them in clutches.
In the first weekend of December, over twenty people were shot dead in Khilani Square including two policemen by gunmen with Kalashnikovs and BKCs in civilian clothing. According to testimonies reported to Amnesty International, who have shed light on the bloodshed in Khilani Square, this was a calculated response by those in command of the paramilitary fighters. “They came to kill. They opened fire immediately. They targeted people by shooting straight at them, not in the air. They were not masked. I do not think they cared if anybody saw them,” said an anonymous male protester. “They came in pick-up trucks and minivans. Endless gunmen. We don’t know how they drove through Baghdad unstopped with all its checkpoints.” There have also been reports that human rights defenders and environmental activists, such as Salman Khairallah and Omar Kadhem Ali, are being abducted by masked men, paramilitary groups and security forces. A further 127 people were wounded.
The electricity power shortages have been part of the problem fuelling the protests, however, in the case of this Khilani Square’s massacre, power was cut to allow pick up trucks to enter the square to kill people in the darkness and sow confusion and terror. The Interior Ministry, which has been at the heart of the vicious response to the protests and responsible for war crimes in the war against Islamic State, reported only four deaths. The massacre in Khilani Square followed another slaughter in southern when security forces shot dead protesters after demonstrators stormed and torched an Iranian consulate in Najaf on 28th November. In Najaf, Nassiriya and Baghdad, over 45 people were killed in a single day. Paramilitary rule and the carving up of the Iraqi state into different fiefdoms and representing American and Iranian interests is threatening to plunge Iraq back into a civil war.
Gunmen caught by activists and protesters have been beaten to a pulp and some have been dragged through the streets and lynched. One sniper caught by protesters was killed and hung up from a traffic light, with protesters filming and distributing the haunting image of the flayed man swinging from a rope in Baghdad's Wathba Square. This form of mob justice came after a further 5 protesters were killed on 11th December in Wathba Square by paramilitary groups. The brutality, not dissimilar to the lynching, dismemberment and hanging of American contractors from a bridge in Falluja in 2004, is born out of rage, and the failure of security forces to protect protesters from these different groups targeting them. Often, the Interior Ministry and elements of the armed forces are complicit.
The fury of the Iraqi protesters, currently living lives between hope and terror and filling squares like Tahrir and Khilani, are predominantly a response to abject governance and nearly two decades of the political elite mismanaging Iraq’s economy. The sectarian dimensions often synonymous with conflict in Iraq and at the forefront of media coverage of Iraq’s turbulent political landscape have played second fiddle in this bout of violence. As with the Arab Uprisings in 2010, 2011 and 2019 in Tunisia, Lebanon, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Egypt, Iraq’s protests have been driven by authoritarian rule (in this case paramilitary impunity) and corruption, and an inability of the government to provide basics such as clean water, food, electricity and jobs to a population increasingly dominated by young people. The inability of Iraq’s government to tackle challenges - endemic since the U.S invasion of Iraq, and the sanctions era during the 1990s - has already cost Iraq’s government, two prime ministers, in two years with both Haider Al-Abadi and Mahdi struggling to come to terms with Iraq’s needs after decades of war, occupation, sanctions and civil war.
The rivalry of Iran and the United States is inextricably linked to the current crisis, as is the proxy war between Tehran and the Israelis and the Gulf States. The protesters have been quick to direct their fury towards these external forces. The realpolitik of the proxy wars between the countries has had very real consequences for the country (and others like Syria and Yemen) exacerbating sectarianism, sparking civil wars and bringing terrorism, militia rule and bloodshed to cities and towns from Basra to Baghdad to Mosul. No part of Iraq has been spared from these proxy wars since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and in the current protests, this weariness and rage with the current status quo where Iraq’s interests are subverted towards foreign agendas are on full display.
Iran is at the forefront, as demonstrated by the burning of its consulates, however, the United States is also bearing the brunt of the intifada, despite the support for the protests on social media by U.S officials such as the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. “No to muhasasa, no to political sectarianism”, one of the slogans used by crowds exemplifies how protests are directly targeting the post-2003 political order and 2005 constitution created by the United States in the aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein. As Fanar al-Haddad, a research fellow at the Middle East Institute at the University of Singapore, explained in an interview with Al-Jazeera, many Iraqi civilians resent the muhasasa, a system introduced by U.S officials (alongside other disastrous policies such as De-Baathfication) in the wake of the invasion. “The term muhasasa is a byword for the political system and all its ills,” said Fanar al-Haddad. “The system underpins the corruption, collusion and the patronage networks that characterise public life in Iraq.”
The results sparked sectarian bloodshed and civil war from the offset and sunk the United States and the United Kingdom into a quagmire. The Bush administration’s war was an act of self-harm to Western political and economic interests in the region as the destruction of Saddam Hussein ushered out a predominantly Sunni political order and replaced it with a Shia dominated government in Baghdad. It was a revolution that took place under foreign occupation and favoured Iranian interests who hated Saddam and had an Islamic regime rooted in Shi’ism.
It would be a gross oversimplification to suggest all Iraqi Shias are pro-Iranian. The incineration of the Iranian consulate in Najaf, arguably the holiest place in Shia Islam and the site of the tomb of Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites is testimony to this, as is the fact that the fiercest protests against the ‘Shia’ regime and Iranian interference are taking place in southern Iraq (where the population is predominantly Shia). Intra-Shia rivalries, common in Iraq for decades - particularly between the wealthy and the impoverished, were common before the invasion of Iraq by Bush and intensified under international sanctions of the 1990s. Conflicts in post-Saddam Iraq between Muqtada Al-Sadr’s paramilitary and activists and those of the Iraqi government (many of whom were exiles before 2003 after fleeing persecution under Saddam’s regime) were also frequent as several Prime Minister’s tried to bring Sadr’s political forces into line during the Iraq War. As with the Sunnis and the Kurds, the Shias of Iraq are not monolithic forces, they have competing interests and sponsors.
In most cases, nationalism and patriotism, as exemplified by the current protests across the country or the Iran-Iraq War have trumped sectarian agendas. Nonetheless, the intra-Shia contest has melded with the protests against poor governance and corruption. Sadr, a critical power broker in Iraq and whose party came first in the 2018 Iraqi elections has sided with the protesters and installed paramilitary fighters and militias to protect protesters. He has also called for investigations into the killings by security forces.
To placate Iranian interests, Sadr announced an alliance with second-placed Hadi al-Amiri in 2018 after the elections concluded. Al-Amiri is Iran’s closest ally in Iraq and leader of a parliamentary alliance of Iranian-backed Shia militia. In the wake of the 2019 protests, Al-Amiri and Sadr announced their intention to remove Mahdi from the government in October after hundreds were killed and over a thousand wounded. "We will work together to secure the interests of the Iraqi people and save the nation in accordance with the public good," al-Amiri pledged while Sadr echoed his words saying that Mahdi should leave office with “dignity intact.” The alliance remains precarious and the removal of Mahdi changes little. U.S officials were mistrustful of Mahdi, and this deepened as Iranian interference in Iraqi politics intensified during 2018 and 2019. As James Risen noted for The Intercept, ‘Washington were happy to see Abdul-Mahdi go. After initially viewing him as an acceptable compromise candidate when he was named prime minister in 2018, senior U.S. officials say they quickly realized he was unable to stand up to Iran.’
What comes next is vital. The revolutions, uprisings and anti-authoritarian activists across the region are a threat to Iran’s power, and the status quo it has struggled to establish across the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran has been convulsed by major protests itself in 2009, 2018 and 2019. Draconian sanctions imposed by President Trump have intensified economic woes and exacerbated social and political cleavages inside Iran while disastrous flooding decimated the country in March. In Lebanon and Iraq, fresh protests, driven by nationalism rather than secularism or sectarian slogans have caused Iran’s key pillars underpinning their power in the region to wobble. In Syria, Assad’s regime, which Tehran has expended considerable military might and economic power to prop up, has collapsed despite crushing the rebellion and is also under tight sanctions by the international community. Protests in Lebanon brought the Syrian pound crashing to its lowest ever level.
As with the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, which ejected the Syrian regime from Lebanon after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Harriri, the Iranians face a similar situation in Iraq, which is valuable both from an economic and military perspective. They risk losing hard-fought influence and their geographical pivot to the Middle East. Breaking the Iraqi protests with blood and bullets is an effort to protect Iran’s assets which project its power in Iraq. The Israelis and Americans, for example, are strongly aware of this encroachment with the former going as far as to bomb a weapons depot in northern Iraq last summer, a tactic duplicated from Iran and Israel’s shadow war in Syria. Iraqi politicians and activists, secular and religious, have often paid the ultimate price for taking a stand against Iranian manipulation of Iraqi politics. This has escalated to a new level with the outbreak of the intifada as exemplified by the U.S bombardment of the Iraqi paramilitary under the PMF’s umbrella, Kata'ib Hezbollah in late December. The airstrikes killed at least 25 fighters precipitating major protests at the U.S embassy and the evacuation of its staff as supporters of the paramilitary group stormed the embassy on New Year’s Eve.
Continuing the massacre of protesters could spark a civil war or a major revolution in Iraq. In terms of realpolitik, a civil war - despite the horrendous costs it could incur for the Iraqi people or an intra-Shia conflict - would partially benefit the Americans from afar, who would be keen to watch Iran get a bloody nose in a political struggle the Iranians thought they had won. However, civil war risks bringing instability on the world’s largest oil field and this would bring disruption to the global economy. With tensions between the United States, Israel, and the Gulf States at an all-time high, the risk of another regional war is very real with Iran unwilling to relinquish its grip on Iraq, and the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel unwilling to let Iraq or Syria be a base for Iranian operations across the Middle East, as southern Lebanon already has for Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in the Levant.
For Iraq to move forward, foreign interference must end, genuine reform of the constitution must be implemented and progressive politics must take hold while paramilitary rule, corruption and sectarianism must be removed as a political tool to procure power and intimidate opponents. A violent revolution would suit neither Iran nor America as it would represent an upturning of the 2003 political order and the balance of power tentatively established between these regional rivals. American and Iranian paramilitaries and security forces, armed to the teeth with their weapons, have shown that this power struggle has sown chaos and brought little for ordinary people struggling to make ends meet. The protests are an expression of this, and symbolise the determination for ordinary people to bring a state above the law to account.
The last time a major revolution occurred on the Persian Gulf in 1979, the Iran-Iraq War started a year later claiming over 1 million lives in both countries and dragging the international community into the malaise. It was a war where much was lost, little was gained and the decade-long war scarred the region. It also paved the way for three more wars in Iraq: the Persian Gulf War, the Iraq War and the Iraqi Civil War. After four decades of perpetual war, a Fifth Persian Gulf War would be a fruitless endeavour for all involved. As ordinary men, women and children have demonstrated in the last two months, there is an alternative way and it is organically, and courageously, unfolding across Tahrir Square and streets across the rest of the Middle East and North Africa.