A basic summary of Iraq. A copy from another forum.
This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the current situation and where the future is heading, first time I read something that is spot on and not influenced by twitterati knee jerk sensationalist bull****. Excellent piece.
Some excerpts below, I recommend reading the whole article.
Iraq’s Sunni Arabs
Any discussion of ISIL and its impact has to begin with Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, roughly one-sixth of the population. There is no sugarcoating their situation. The occupation of the Sunni regions of Iraq by ISIL is a cataclysm from which the Sunni will not recover for a generation or more.
It has become fashionable, even commonplace, to blame this sympathy for ISIL with the abuses of the Maliki government, but the root causes are far deeper. While the security forces of the last government did act harshly in Sunni areas, these actions were very much in line with the reaction of almost all non-Western governments (and some Western ones) to terrorism and insurgency.
As the scholar and analyst Fanar Haddad notes, this support for revolutionary movements was less about the rejection of the Maliki government and far more about rejection of the entire post-2003 political order, in which leaders are selected democratically, rather than chosen from among the Sunni elite. For many Sunni, the core grievance with the Baghdad government is that they are not the ones running it.
Further over-representation is often recommended by the West, but this ignores the disproportionate share of power that the Sunni already enjoy — a fact usually elided over by Western commentators but very much part of the Iraqi dialogue. In this past election, the roughly 19 to 20 percent vote share won by Sunni (and nationalist) affiliated parties has translated into 32 percent (8 of 25) of the Ministerial slots, including plum posts such as Defense, Agriculture, Education, Electricity, and Trade, plus speaker of the Parliament, a vice president, and a deputy prime minister.
Iraq's Kurds
A subtlety largely lost on the rest of the world is that the Kurds are now, de facto, establishing control in the rest of the disputed territories , often clearing Arab Sunni civilians along with ISIL, all with the help of the United States Air Force. The Kurds, who stood by and watched the ISIL invasion of Arab Iraq, now welcome international support in their own efforts against ISIL which — after some initial embarrassment over the ISIL push towards Irbil — have had impressive successes in Ninewah.
But the Kurds have also had at least four key setbacks in the past year, with — as in the rest of Iraq — the key political issues often masked by military noise.
First, it appears clear that Erdogan’s Turkey has crushed any talk of formal independence, thus the scramble to repair arrangements with Baghdad.
Third, the illusion of democracy in Kurdistan is beginning to lose its charm. Hopes that the KRG would emerge from two-family tribalism have been crushed, at least for the present.
In short, the Kurds find themselves stuck with Iraq, despite the leadership having whipped their population into an irrational (if historically understandable) frenzy about independence.
Iraq’s Shi’a Arabs
Iraq’s roughly two-thirds majority Shi’a have been the least immediately impacted by the events of last summer, though the mass attacks by car bombs have continued their murderous tempo as in past years, but they have suffered. Those few that have fallen into ISIL’s hands have been immediately executed by the apocalyptic group — a fact that gives particular urgency to the Shi’a, even if they are largely protected by their geography. Last June’s execution of 1700 Shi’a military cadets by ISIL fighters — aided by, in some reports, local tribes with Ba’ath party ties — remains a very salient rallying cry in Iraqi politics , even if largely forgotten by the West. The impressive ISIL offensives of last June never truly threatened Shi’a core communities, so their losses are largely those of the “martyrs” of the security forces and militias (though these are sufficient to keep a steady drumbeat of burials in Najaf cemetery), as they push the fight north and west towards Mosul and Anbar. Nonetheless, being confronted by a force explicitly dedicated to sectarian genocide does focus the mind, and this attack against Iraqi Shi’a is seen as being in continuity with other such acts both in time (e.g., the Wahhabi sacking of the Iraqi holy city of Karbala in 1802) and space (e.g., the governmental oppression of Bahraini and Saudi Shi’a, and the murderous campaign against the Shi’a of Pakistan).
There has been a great and frequent concern expressed over the role of the Shi’a militias (or volunteers), some of it justified, some of it overstated, reflecting entrenched Washington biases in the region. But we should remain relatively unconcerned about the militias in a military sense for at least three reasons.
Third, we have every indication that the militias intend — upon completion of their fight with ISIL — to either return home or be regularized by the central government in some way. The government needs volunteers at the moment, but seems intent on restoring the government monopoly on force at the earliest opportunity — with no objection from the militias themselves. This is, after all, what happened after 2008, albeit with Maliki’s spring 2008 attack on the Sadrists accelerating the trend.
This does not mean that there should not be concern about the militias, simply that concerns of a military nature are overly weighted. Again, the real concerns should be political — specifically electoral. Iraq will have elections again in early 2017 and 2018
Iraq turns to Iran not because they love them (in fact, the opposite is true, for the most part), but because they are there and they always will be, at least next door. Among the Shi’a of southern Iraq, people are quick to note that ISIL invaded Mosul in June, but U.S. airstrikes did not begin until August (correlated with, if perhaps not caused by, the ISIL threat to Irbil), while the Iranians were there with advisors and weapons virtually the next day, a response they replicated for the Kurds two months later.
