Why Sunnis HATE Baghdad : WELCOME Islamic State

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Will Iraq be next to have an Arab Spring?

Massive protests by Sunnis in Baghdad against the government have raised the prospect of a new uprising in the Arab world.

By Colin Freeman, Baghdad

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5:59PM GMT 02 Mar 2013

It has all the outward trappings of another Arab Spring: tens of thousands of demonstrators, a permanent protesters' "camp", and megaphoned demands for the removal of another "dictator".

Yet the slogans that now ring out on the streets of Iraq each Friday are the voice of a community not best known for championing civil rights - be it for themselves or anyone else.

Instead, they are the disenfranchised members of Saddam Hussein's Sunni minority - the Muslim sect that enjoyed three decades of privileged status under his rule, and which spearheaded the long and bloody insurgency against British and American troops.

Led by grizzled ex-members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party and former insurgents rather than Facebook-surfing students, they now hold huge demonstrations across Baghdad and the so-called Sunni Triangle, once notorious as a battleground for US forces.

Meanwhile, their own version of the permanent protest camp at Cairo's Tahrir Square sits on a stretch of road near the flashpoint city of Fallujah, better known as the "graveyard of the Americans".

These days, though, the target of their ire is not Iraq's former occupiers, but the democratic Iraqi government that took over in their place. The Sunnis, who make up around a third of Iraq's 33 million population, now chant that the Shia-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki treats them as second-class citizens - a cry that could re-ignite the vicious Sunni-Shia civil war of six years ago.

"These are peaceful and civilised protests demanding nothing more than our legitimate rights," insists Hamid Obaid al Mutlaq, a Sunni parliamentarian, sipping a glass of green tea in his heavily-guarded Baghdad compound. "All we want is fair treatment from a government that has a monopoly of decision-making, and which is treating us unjustly."

In an interview last week with The Telegraph, he ticked off a long list of Sunni grievances against Mr Maliki, whom they accuse of being far too close to the Shia autocracy in neighbouring Iran.

Draconian anti-terrorism laws introduced at the height of Iraq's insurgency troubles were being used to detain and jail innocent Sunnis, Mr Mutlaq said. And under the pretext of the de-Ba'athification laws introduced by the Americans to purge the country of pro-Saddam officials, Sunnis were also routinely barred from senior government jobs, especially in the security forces.

Shia politicians in Iraq deny such claims, saying that tough anti-terror laws are still needed, that Sunnis now have their own parliamentary bloc, and that at worst, they are tasting the medicine they once dished out themselves under Saddam.

But the fact that Sunnis are now mobilising in large numbers has alarmed Western diplomats, who fear that despite the peaceful rhetoric, the demonstrations could re-spark the sectarian conflict that killed an estimated 30,000 Iraqis between 2005 and 2008.

While such violence is far from the peak of 2006, when up to 3,000 died in a single month, gun attacks and car bombs continue to claim up to 50 lives or more a week.

And just in the past week, Sunni areas of Baghdad has been abuzz with talk of a fresh campaign of targeted assassinations and intimidation by Shia militants, allegedly to frighten them from joining in the street protests.

In the sprawling Jihad district of Baghdad, security was stepped up last week after threatening fliers were distributed claiming to be from a new, Iran-backed militia called the Mukhtar Army. They warned Sunni residents to leave or face "great agony".

"Residents are panicking," said Waleed Nadhim, 33, a local shopkeeper who now plans to leave the area. "In a lawless country like Iraq, nobody can ignore threats like this."

There was, however, not even a warning for Hamza Mohammed Abdallah, 50, a popular and hard-working education official killed in a drive-by shooting outside his offices in west Baghdad last Sunday lunchtime.

"His killing is part of a plan to eliminate Sunnis from Baghdad because the Sunnis are now holding protests," sobbed one relative during an interview at a house in Ameriya, another trouble-prone Sunni neighbourhood, as he kissed a picture of Mr Abdallah stored on his mobile phone.

"We can take vengeance tonight or tomorrow, we could kill dozens of people, but we would be killing innocents, and the Sunni clerics forbid that, despite our strong incentive."

There is no proof of that Shia militants were responsible for Mr Abdallah's killing - others believe it related to his objections to a corruption scam being run in his office. But rumours are all that is needed in a tense neighbourhood like Ameriya, where people are still quick to leap on the slightest suspicions: when The Telegraph visited, the owner of house made his children swear not to tell their friends for fear he would be seen as a foreign spy.

The Mukhtar Army, however, does appear to exist at least in name. Its founder, a bearded Shia cleric named Wathiq al-Battat, announced its creation to an Iraqi television channel earlier this month, saying it was needed to prevent a repeat of events in Syria, where Sunni rebels are pursuing the downfall of the Iran-backed Shia regime.

Mr Maliki's government has since issued a warrant for Mr Battat's release, but Sunnis say that the fact he currently remains free shows they are not taking the threat seriously. As proof, they point out that Shia militants with much more blood on their hands are also at liberty, in particular the Iran-backed League of the Righteous, which was responsible for the 2007 kidnapping of the British IT consultant, Peter Moore, and his four bodyguards, as well as thousands of attacks on British and US troops.

In recent months the League has been establishing itself as a legitimate political party, opening religious schools and campaign offices, but Sunnis claim it still acts as an unofficial militia for the Iraqi government, which acknowledges friendly relations with its political wing.

"The League have officially joined the political process, so they have created the name of the Mukhtar Army instead," said one senior Sunni source.

True or not, such claims have only heightened the anger at the Sunni protests, which many fear could now erupt into open warfare. On Friday, thousands of demonstrators converged again around the "tent city", which lies on the highway between Fallujah and neighbouring Ramadi. There they heard the Sunni finance minister, Rafaie al-Esawi, announce his resignation live on stage. "It doesn't honour me to be part of a sectarian government," he said.

It was the arrest of Mr Esawi's bodyguards on terrorism charges last December that sparked the current Sunni protests in the first place. Iraqi authorities claim that they carried out assassinations along with bodyguards employed by the Sunni vice-President, Tareq al-Hashemi, who fled the country last year after being sentenced to death in absentia.

Mr Maliki's opponents, however, say that on that basis, many of his own supporters should be in jail too, and cite it as proof that he is turning Iraq back to a one-man state.

They accuse the perma-stubbled 62-year-old, who signed the death warrant that led Saddam to the gallows, of bypassing key power-sharing agreements in order to put his key loyalists in top security positions. Rival politicians allege that he also uses intimidatory tactics, such as parking tanks outside their official residences and bringing squads of thuggish-looking bodyguards into cabinet meetings.

In his defence, Mr Maliki says that hundreds of Shia militiamen currently languish in Iraq's jails too, and that after six exhausting years trying to steer the country from civil war, someone else is welcome to "try their luck" as prime minister.

Outside observers, meanwhile, say the blame lies as much with Iraq's quarrelsome opposition, who have allowed Mr Maliki to run rings around them in parliament, and a political culture still poisoned by the Saddam era.

In the words of a recent report by the International Crisis Group, Iraq's predicament "directly relates to the inability to overcome the legacy of Saddam Hussein's regime and its repressive practices: a culture of deep suspicion, coupled with a winner-take-all and loser-lose-all form of politics."

Indeed, about the only thing that Mr Malik and his opponents agree on is the risk of civil war. In an interview last week ahead of the 10th anniversary of Iraq's US-led invasion later this month, he warned that if President Bashar al-Assad was toppled by Sunni rebels in Syria, there would most likely be a "sectarian war in Iraq". And this time, as some Iraqis nervously acknowledge, there will be no foreign troops in the country to get in the way.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... pring.html

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The Baghdad government made no attempt to alleivate the problem or allow the Sunni to take a more active part in the Iraqi government

To say that the Government did nothing is wrong

They arrested and tortured many of the wives of the Sunni leaders

Wives and daughters targeted by security forces in Iraq - report

Iraqi police accused of stirring sectarian tensions by targeting insurgent suspects' wives
By Colin Freeman

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5:00AM GMT 06 Feb 2014

Iraqi security forces are helping to push the country back towards civil war by arresting and torturing the wives of suspected insurgents, human rights campaigners claim on Thursday.

A report compiled by Human Rights Watch details appalling allegations of violence and sexual abuse against women and girls by the Iraqi police, army, and special forces.

Women detainees claim to have suffered weeks of beatings, rape and electrocutions from interrogators, who sometimes threatened to arrest their daughters as well and do the same to them.

The culture of sexual violence was commonplace that one employee at a women's jail told Human Rights Watch: "We expect that they’ve been raped by police on the way to the prison.”

The inspector general of Iraq's interior ministry, Aqil Tarahy, told the report that such abuse was the work of a few "monsters" from the regime of the late Saddam Hussein, who had not yet been weeded out from the security services.

But Human Rights Watch claims to have detected a deliberate policy by Iraq's Shia-led government to target female family members of terrorism suspects, most of whom are drawn from Iraq's Sunni minority.

The arrest of one such group of women during a security service sweep in a Sunni farming town 14 months ago was one of the sparks for the massive Sunni civil rights protests that have now lurched the country back towards sectarianism.

In the past year the protests have in turn been infiltrated by Sunni extremists from al-Qaeda, who have regrouped in strength and last month attempted to seize the Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

"The government frequently targets women family members of men wanted on suspicion of terrorism, often with no evidence," said Erin Evers, the Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch, who said Baghdad had failed to honour promises made a year ago to address complaints.

She added: "The failure to keep those promises helped fuel the protests that led to the current fighting in Falluja and Ramadi."

In preparing the report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 27 female detainees, along with employees from Iraq's prison service, interior and human rights ministries, as well diplomats, United Nations officials, defence lawyers and judges.

Together, they painted a picture of near-impunity for the security services, who are under huge pressure to curb terrorism ahead of April's parliamentary elections.

One judge spoke of four "infamous" fellow judges who gave legal cover for human rights abuses by the security forces. All apparently had close links to the office of the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has taken personal control of Iraq’s security apparatus since assuming office in 2006.

A number of human rights ministry inspectors who had led investigations into malpractice by security units close to Mr Maliki had fled the country for fear of reprisals, the report said.

Among the detainee cases highlighted in the report was a November 2012 raid by Iraq's federal police on 11 homes in the town of Taji, in the so-called "Sunni triangle" north of Baghdad. Some 11 women and 29 children were detained.

"Throughout their detention, police put plastic bags over each of their heads until they began to suffocate, and electrocuted and beat some of them, according to the women’s accounts," the report said.

One 22-year-woman claimed that interrogators repeatedly questioned her about her husband, and then accused her of being a terrorist.

"(They said) 'Why don’t you show us the bodies of the Shia you slaughtered - where have you hidden them?'" she told the report. "They called me daughter of a bitch, daughter of a whore."

The arrest of the Taji females subsequently became a cause celebre for the Sunni protest movement, which demanded their release. But a judge then issued orders for 12 of them to be detained under anti-terrorism laws for "covering up" for their husbands. Among those charged was an 11-year-old girl accused of hiding incriminating documents.

In another case, a female journalist accused of being married to an al-Qaeda member alleged that she had been tied up and repeatedly raped by an interrogator. "He would relax, have a cigarette, and put it out on my buttock, and then start again,” she said.

One woman who was interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Baghdad's death row prison was on crutches - the result, she said, of nine days of beatings and electric shocks in March 2012. "The split nose, back scars, and burns on her breast that Human Rights Watch observed were consistent with the abuse she alleged." the report said.

She was executed last September, seven months after Human Rights Watch interviewed her. This was despite lower court rulings that had said the charges against her should be dismissed because of medical reports that supported her claims of mistreatment.

While most of the cases involved women linked to men wanted by the authorities, others involved people who had simply run foul of powerful business interests.

One manageress at a firm involved in government construction contracts claimed to have been tortured simply for refusing to rubber-stamp a sub-standard building project backed by a politician.

When she refused to confess to accusations of bribery, her interrogators took her mobile phone and found a picture of her teenage daughter. "They said: 'We can take her just like we took you'. I would have said anything at that point."

Officials at the Iraqi justice and interior ministries, who currently have around 1,100 females among their 40,000-strong prison population, told Human Rights Watch that most of the detainees were probably lying.

But the report also quoted one judge as saying that Mr Maliki himself appeared to have little respect for judicial process. The judge claimed that at a lawyer's dinner in October 2012, Mr Maliki asked the audience: "Why do you take cases of terrorists?”

Aqil Tarahy, inspector general of the Interior Ministry, denied that abuse was systemic.

“We need time to progress from where we were before, which was a total absence of human rights culture,” he said. “Saddam created monsters, and some of these monsters still work in our ministries.”

But Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, claimed that root and branch reform was urgently needed.

“Iraqi security forces and officials act as if brutally abusing women will make the country safer,” he said. "In fact, these women and their relatives have told us that as long as security forces abuse people with impunity, we can only expect security conditions to worsen.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... eport.html