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Iraq: Has
Brotherhood Hijacked Protests?
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Decades of suppression under Saddam Hussein's Baath party has either
kept political Islamist forces led 'ideologically' by the Muslim
Brotherhood in their shells or forced their leaders into self-imposed exile
in several Western countries.
Saddam's iron-fist policies have curtailed the expansion of the
Brotherhood and Islamists in general.
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq has no 'formal' organization. The
closest-linked affiliate body ideologically is, however, the Iraqi Islamic
Party (IIP), whose support base is almost exclusively Sunni Arab.
The IIP's most prominent member in recent years was Tariq al-Hashimi,
the vice-president who fled to Turkey in the face of an arrest warrant in
December 2011 and a subsequent death sentence in absentia after
being convicted in court of masterminding and financing terrorist
operations and targeted assassinations of Shiite figures.
Following on from the government's arrest warrant against the bodyguards
of another leading Sunni politician, Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi in
December 2012, the IIP started to play a prominent role in organizing
protests in Sunni Arab areas against the Shiite-led government.
The protesters in the very beginning of their sit-in (which started in
late 2012) were united against 'one enemy'; namely, the prime minister
Nouri Al-Maliki and his government. They were chanting in unison against
what they perceived as marginalization and discrimination by Shiite Maliki.
But later on, several political slogans and placards that had nothing to
do with their 'cause' started to become more visible at several protests
especially at the main sit-in camp in the city of Ramadi, the capital of
the Sunni Anbar province (the largest in Iraq with joint borders with
Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia).
For example, in the city of Samarra, on one Friday protest demonstrators
were holding placards with the "R4BIA" symbol, featuring a yellow
background and a black hand with four fingers upheld to commemorate the
hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood protesters killed after Egyptian security
forces broke up by force the main protest camp for the Islamist group in
August of last year.
One of the placards featuring the R4BIA symbol read: "The Sunnis of
Iraq are With You.. Oh People of Egypt." At other protest sites,
Brotherhood-leaning clerics could be heard denouncing the 'coup' in Egypt
as a conspiracy organized by the Coptic Church and Western powers against
Islam.
Such politicized slogans among other reasons have actually divided the
Sunni community down the middle.
The heavy-handed government approach against the protesters has paved
the way to the emergence of old insurgent Sunni groups like Jaysh Rijal
al-Tariq al-Naqshibandia (JRTN: a Ba'athist-Sufi armed group led by
Saddam's right-hand man Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri) in the form of
"Military Councils for the Revolutionaries of Sunni provinces (known
as MCRs).
Some of the prominent Sunni politicians and their tribes have further
chosen to throw their lot into the government camp.
Anbar governor, Ahmed Khalaf al-Dulaimi, who up to late December had
supported the Sunni protesters, is backing now Maliki, who had ordered the
breakup of the Ramadi protest camp, alleging that it had become a cover-up
to Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Furthermore, the MCR insurgents and their supporters - many of whom are
driven by a belief that Sunni Arabs constitute a demographic majority in
Iraq and that therefore the Shiite-led government in Baghdad should be
overthrown - view the IIP as a collaborator with Maliki, deriding it as the
"Party of Surrender" (al-Hizb al-Istislami, playing on al-Hizb
al-Islami) and have accused IIP-affiliated militants of the "Iraqi
Hamas" of siding with "Maliki's militias."
This anger towards the IIP is also reflected at the wider popular level
in Sunni Arab areas, and has culminated in the recent burning by MCR-linked
fighters of the IIP's headquarters in Fallujah.
Even among those who decided not to take up arms against the government
as happened in Fallujah and some parts in nearby Ramadi, the IIP is heavily
criticized for not taking the initiative in calling for a Sunni federal
region in western Iraq. They accuse the IIP leaders of being complacent as
they insisted on 'reforming' the incumbent government rather than toppling
it.
Consequently, the 'moderate' IIP has become largely marginal in recent
months with militant, tribal Sunni groups having the upper hand in
dictating the course of action.
Given that the revived Sunni insurgency is expected to take several
months if not years to quell at the minimum, the Muslim Brotherhood as a
whole in Iraq is likely to remain on the peripheries for quite some time.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle
East Forum and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
Related
Topics: Iraq, Radical Islam
| Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
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