Bringing an end to Tikrit

Yesterday, the Iraqi Green Zone government announced that it had begun operations to retake Tikrit and surrounding towns and villages from the Islamic State (ISIS). The operation consists of some 27,000 Shia fighters, 10,000 of whom belong to Al-Hashd Al-Sha’bi or the Popular Mobilisation which is a militia comprised of Shia volunteers that were mustered after Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a religious edict commanding his followers to fight ISIS last summer. It is worth noting that Sistani never issued a similar edict commanding his followers to fight against the invading armies of the United States and its allies who committed atrocities and war crimes just as heinous as ISIS.

The story of Tikrit and many other Iraqi cities is not as simple as a government fighting to retake towns and cities lost to terrorists. It has become the easiest thing in the world to lay all the blame at ISIS’s door. On its part, it has certainly not made life easy for Iraq’s oppressed and brutalised Sunni Arabs with their continuing and appalling crimes against humanity, persecution of religious and ethnic minorities and destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. Savage though it may be, the Green Zone government and its allied militias are not much different in its brutality and barbarism. Also, ISIS is not the only player on the Iraqi field representing the Sunnis.

When Tikrit fell last summer to a force comprised of different groups and factions, only ISIS was mentioned in the mainstream media. Although all the military successes against the sectarian Iraqi regime were popularly attributed to the fighters of ISIS, this was far from the truth. There are groups such as the General Military Council for the Iraqi Revolutionaries (GMCIR) who are comprised of an alliance of dozens of Iraqi Sunni tribes. These armed groups were formed as a defensive reaction to the actions of former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki who committed massacres against peaceful Iraqi demonstrators and violently dispersed their protests. The subsequent military action against the Green Zone regime that ISIS took advantage of actually had legitimate and non-violent beginnings.

Groups such as the GMCIR helped in the taking of Mosul and Tikrit and other major Iraqi towns. They did not “help” ISIS to take these towns so much as they agreed to focus on the Iraqi regime rather than on each other. After all, it is common knowledge that the only people to have ever successfully and decisively defeated earlier iterations of ISIS were Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. ISIS’s current success directly relates to the fact that after the Sunni Arabs defeated Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), they were marginalised, targeted and had atrocities committed against them by the same Iraqi government that they are now supposed to trust. Why should the Sunni Arabs fight ISIS this time, only to be assured destruction either at the hands of ISIS or the Iranian-backed Iraqi regime and its militias once they finish the job that the Shia death squads are incapable of doing?

ISIS changed the calculus of the strategy against the Green Zone government when it threatened the Kurdish controlled city of Erbil in August 2014. US President Barack Obama announced that America will now be “coming to help” after ISIS did not heed US threats to bomb them if they advanced towards Erbil. For some strange reason, with Baghdad in sight, ISIS decided to attack Erbil, drawing in the United States and a coalition of Western nations and their air forces and military advisers. There is simply no strategically sensible reason for ISIS to have made such a play, apart from to force a Western commitment to Iraq. The other rebel groups, including the GMCIR, have since melted away, likely because they can see that what ISIS has done has endangered the actual liberation of Iraq from Iranian occupation and tutelage. They may yet re-emerge to fight major battles against the Iraqi regime in order to stop massacres such as those in Barwana and other areas allegedly “liberated” by the sectarian government.

The current operation to recapture Tikrit is not just about ISIS. Everywhere the Shia militias have gone they have slaughtered the local Sunnis, and Tikrit will be no different to Barwana or any number of Iraqi towns and cities. The only difference would be the scale of the slaughter. Anyone and everyone could be painted as being ISIS loyalists and subsequently killed. Laughably, Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi said that he would proscribe any militias that operate “outside the framework of the state”. Surely any militia is by its very nature working outside of the framework of any civilised and functioning state?

The prime minister is obviously acutely aware of the massacres and atrocities being committed by the sectarian militias that he has allied with and hence he is trying hard to maintain an image of being a prime minister for all Iraqis. However, if he was that keen on stopping their savage barbarism, why has he done nothing to curtail them since coming to power many months ago? The Iraqi military frequently watches on whilst these militias commit war crimes, and they even actively participate in the wanton murder of Sunnis. How can Iraqis living in ISIS-controlled areas believe that they will be safe if the Iraqi regime retakes their towns? This question is precisely what will give ISIS an edge in its defences, as it can rely on the fact that local Sunnis will not rise up against them.

Prime Minister Al-Abadi is further discredited in his claims to stop the actions of these death squads when the leader of one of them, the Badr Brigades, openly threatened an entire tribe of Sunni Arabs, the Elbu Ajeel. Hadi Al-Amiri, a government minister (a part-time job as he ran his death squad), accused them – an entire tribe of thousands – of being in league with ISIS by their inaction, and said that it was time for them to choose whether they are “with Iraq, or with terrorism”.

If that does not foretell massacres and a genocide against the Sunni population, now criminalised for not actively fighting against ISIS, then perhaps the news in the same article that the enigmatic Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander, General Qassem Soleimani, is leading the front in Tikrit might encourage that notion.

This latest operation, and the planned operation to retake Mosul, is not about liberating Iraq and Iraqis from the grip of ISIS. It is about ending these cities, and committing a horrifying genocide against the Sunni Arabs under the guise of the fight ISIS.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.