International, regional and internal players vying for interests, wealth, power or influence are all beneficiaries of the ‘al Qaeda threat’ in Iraq and, in spite of their deadly and bloody competitions, they agree only on two denominators, namely that the presence of the US-installed and Iran-supported sectarian government in Baghdad and its sectarian al Qaeda antithesis are the necessary casus belli for their proxy wars, which are tearing apart the social fabric of Iraqi society, disintegrating the national unity of Iraq and bleeding its population to the last Iraqi.
The Iraqi people seem a passive player, paying in their blood for all the Machiavellian dirty politics. The war, which the US unleashed by its invasion of Iraq in 2003, undoubtedly continues and the bleeding of the Iraqi people continues as well.
According to the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq, 34,452 Iraqis have been killed since 2008 and more than 10,000 were killed in 2013 during which suicide bombings more than tripled according to the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk’s recent testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. AFP reported that more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed last January. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, citing Iraqi government figures, says that more than 140,000 Iraqis have already been displaced from Iraq’s western province of Anbar.
Both the US and Russia are now supplying Iraq with multi-billion arms sales to empower the sectarian government in Baghdad to defeat the sectarian ‘al Qaeda threat’. They see a casus belli in al Qaeda to regain lost ground in Iraq, the first to rebalance its influence against Iran in a country where it paid a heavy price in human souls and taxpayer money only for Iran to reap the exploits of its invasion of 2003 while the second could not close an opened Iraqi window of opportunity to re-enter the country as an exporter of arms, when it used to be the major supplier of weaponry to the Iraqi military before the US invasion.
Regionally, Iraq’s ambassador to Iran, Muhammad Majid al-Sheikh, announced earlier this month that Baghdad has signed an agreement with Tehran “to purchase weapons and military equipment”. Iraqi Defence Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen defence and security agreements with Iran last September.
Meanwhile, Syria, which is totally preoccupied with fighting a three-year-old widespread terrorist insurgency within its borders, could not but coordinate defence with the Iraq military against the common enemy of the ‘al Qaeda threat’ in both countries.
Counterbalancing politically and militarily, Turkey and the GCC countries, led by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in their anti-Iran proxy wars in Iraq and Syria, are pouring billions of petrodollars to empower a sectarian counterbalance by money, arms and political support, which end up empowering al Qaeda indirectly or its sectarian allies directly, thus perpetuating the war and fueling the sectarian strife in Iraq, as a part of an unabated effort to contain Iran’s expanding regional sphere of influence. Ironically, the Turkish member of the US-led NATO as well as the GCC Arab NATO non-member ‘partners’ seems to stand on the opposite side of its US strategic ally in the Iraqi war in this tragic drama of Machiavellian dirty politics.
Internally, the three major partners in the ‘political process’ are no less Machiavellian in their exploitation of the al Qaeda card. The self-ruled northern Iraqi Kurdistan region, which counts down for the right timing for secession, could not be but happy with the preoccupation of the central government in Baghdad with the al Qaeda threat. Pro-Iran Shia sectarian parties and militias use this threat to strengthen their sectarian bonds and justify their loyalty to Iran as their protector. Their Sunni sectarian rivals are using the threat to promote themselves as the ‘alternative’ to al Qaeda in representing the Sunnis and to justify their seeking financial, political and paramilitary support from the US, GCC and Turkey, allegedly to counter the pro-Iran sectarian government in Baghdad as well as the expanding Iranian influence in Iraq and the region.
Exploiting his partners’ inter-fighting, Iraqi two-term Prime Minister Nouri (or Jawad) Al-Maliki, has manoeuvred to win a constitutional interpretation allowing him to run for a third term and, to reinforce his one-man show of governance, he was in Washington DC last November, then in Tehran the next December, seeking military ‘help’ against the al Qaeda threat, and he got it.
The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories