The
Iraq we know and hear so much about today is a new nation. The British
created it in 1922 when the late sir Winston Churchill was minister
of colonies. He came to Egypt with his, then, advisor, T. E. Lawrence
(the famous Lawrence of Arabia), where they re-drew the map of the
middle east according to the (not so secret) treaty of Sykes / Picot.
The
British team gave Transjordan to prince Abdullah, second
son of the Cherif Hussein of Mecca, with the title of emir,
and united the three Turkish Welayats of Mosul, Baghdad and
Basrah
into
one country to which they gave the ancient Islamic name of Iraq.
The crown of the kingdom of Iraq was offered to prince Faysal,
third son of Cherif Hussein, and the close friend of Lawrence.
The
new kingdom (Iraq) was a cocktail of various religious and ethnic
groups with different languages and cultures and different political and
national allegiance. Only a policy of "stick and carrot" could
keep them together. King Faysal and his successors followed
the policy of the "carrot", but, after the 1958 revolution of brigadier
general Abdel Karim Qassem, which overthrew the monarchy, the various
dictators who ruled Iraq, starting with Qassem and ending with Saddam
Hussein, followed the policy of the stick with the odd carrots here
and there.
The
following is a list of those different ethnic and religious groups, starting
from the north:
| 1.
The
Kurds: like the Iranians, the Kurds are
Aryans,
subjects of the Ottoman Empire. They number around 25 million
of which 3.5 millions are Iraqi Kurds. The Kurds
were promised
independence by the treaty of Sevres, in 1920, but this independence
was short lived and was revoked by the treaty of
Lausannne, in 1922
which divided the Kurdistan amongst
Turkey,
Iraq,
Iran
and Syria. Ever since, the Kurds' aspiration was to
reunite the Kurdistan under one flag.
They
fought hard to achieve that objective for the last three decades or so.
The Iraqi Kurds are themselves divided in two major political parties,
the Kurdistan democratic party (KDP) led by Masoud Barazani
and
the patriotic union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani.
Both parties which have been at each other throats for years, reached a
kind of "modus vivendi" and formed one parliament in the Kurdish
town of Irbil and, established a kind of autonomy after the defeat
of Saddam Hussein in the first gulf war. While the KDP
reigns
supreme in and around the cities of Dahuk
and Irbil, just
south of the turkish border, the
PUK controls the border area with
Iran,
in and around the city of Sulaymanya. A
Sunni group,
composed of "Afghans",
Kurds and Arabs called
Jamaat
Ansar al Islam, escaped from Afghanistan after the collapse of the
Taliban
regime,
and settled in the PUK area attacking the
PUK every now and
then. Their number is not believed to exceed 600 persons.
2.
In and around Mosul a large community of Christians, called Assyrians,
live side by side with the Kurds. They have their own Semitic
language and their number does not exceed 250 thousands. Tareq
Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq is a Christian Assyrian!!!
3.
Added to this equation are the aspirations of about 2 millions local Turkmen,
who live in northwestern Iraq, along its border with Syria.
Their ambition is to be joined with Turkey.
4.
Another faction to be considered in the coming war is the Yazidis
numbering a little bit over a million. The Yazidis follow
a religion that predates Christianity and Islam and they have lived for
centuries in the remote foothills of northern Iraq. Muslim and Christian
Iraqis believe the Yazidis are satanic. But the Yazidis
bristle at the term "devil worshipers" a connotation, they
say, is used by their Muslim and Christian countrymen to mock their religion.
The Yazidis fiercely support the central government in Baghdad
and,
like the Alawites in Syria, have many of their members in
the highest echelon of the Iraqi armed forces.
5.
Sunni
Arabs
are concentrated in the area between the city of Tikrit, birthplace
of Saddam Hussein, and about a hundred miles south of
Baghdad.
They constitute a minority in Iraq and yet they control the government.
6.
The Shiites, which constitute around 60% of the Iraqi population,
live in the south where the two most holy cities of Shiism, Kerbala
and a Najaf are situated. Their largest concentration is in
and around the city of Basrah. A small percentage of the shiites
support the central government, while the majority look at Tehran,
Iran
where their leader Ayatollah al-Hakim resides.
7.
Good luck America. What worries me is not the war against
a very weak Iraq, which will be a piece of cake, but the aftermath of the
war. It will be very hard for the U.S.A. to keep that country
together even under a loosely federal government in Baghdad!!! |
The above is a short
paper that I prepared and distributed to a class of (Canadian) Federal
Government employees, during a lecture I gave in Ottawa, a few days prior
to the invasion of Iraq. Officially I am a retired Civil Servant,
since December 1999, but, for the last four years I have been under contract
with the Gov. to present a lecture every now and then.
My classes are usually
composed of Army, Police, Immigration and Foreign Service Officers.
During the lecture mentioned above I was supposed to talk about the
"Middle East, a History of conflicts" and it was supposed to cover
the Middle East since the treaty of Sykes - Picot, the Balfour declaration
and the treaty of Versailles until now; but, because of the conflict
with Iraq and the imminent invasion, half of my lecture was concentrated
on that country.
In conclusion, I would
like to point out that Ayatollah al-Hakim returned to southern Iraq
then to al-Najaf a few days after the beginning of the hostilities.
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Regards to all.
Kamal
© Kamal Katba 2003
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