Matthieu Aikins talking:
what, you know, happened was essentially a reaction to the rapid gains that ISIS made this summer. When the defense of Mosul and other areas collapsed, these militias were called upon as a kind of last line of defense in order to protect the sort of Shia areas of the southern part of the country, including Iraq. And they were effective at doing that. But in doing so, as we’ve already discussed, they took over this preeminent position within the Iraqi state.
So, when I was there, I met with militia commanders, including one from a very notorious militia called Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. It’s a splinter group from the Mahdi Army that once fought the Americans and is now fighting ISIS. And the commander explained to me something that I’ve heard from other places, as well, that on the ground, these militia commanders are often leading the operations, and they’re essentially mixed in with Iraqi army and police units, borrowing weapons, being supplied by ammunition from them, using heavy weapons, and often exercising command and control over Iraqi police and army. And what that says is that the two of—you know, the formal state security services, what’s left with them, and these militias have become entangled to such a degree that it’s hard in many cases to make a meaningful distinction between them on the ground.
the thing is that you would be just confronted with these religious symbols that make, you know, no pretense that Iraq is a state that is supposed to have equal regard for the different sects and religions that compose it. Baghdad is now a Shia city. And so, I think one of the things we’ve seen after the events this summer is that mask has really come off. As Erin pointed out, a lot of these things were happening before. And a lot of them were predicted. What happened in Amerli and in Diyala was essentially predicted by Human Rights Watch and other groups that were investigating it, that there would be what amounts to ethnic cleansing, in my view. But the mask has sort of slipped off now, and there’s really no pretense or attempt at pretense that this is not a sectarian war that’s being fought by the preeminent actors on both sides, ISIS and the militias.
last year, there was an estimated 17,000 Iraqis that were killed. That’s the most violent year by far since the peak of the violence, 2006, 2007. In some cases, it’s one-sided, in areas of Baghdad that I visited. These were Sunni areas that had been taken over by al-Qaeda in 2006 and ’07, often because the communities wanted some sort of defense against the Shia militias. Now they’re being terrorized by Shia groups. There’s absolute, you know, outright warfare in the countryside, massacres on both sides. So I think we’re actually there. With the shift toward offensive operations of the parties’ militias, especially with large areas like Mosul and Fallujah, I mean, they’re going to make what’s been happening in Amerli and Diyala look minor in comparison to the scale of massacres and human rights abuses that are likely to occur.
One Iraqi adviser told me it was like hide and seek. You know, the Iranians would show up when the Americans weren’t there, and the Americans would show up when the Iranians weren’t there. This is in the sort of ministries and main bases. The Iranians are the only ones present in the field, really, so far.
I think you have to acknowledge that Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq. I mean, this is their doorstep. ISIS is a brutal anti-Shia group that poses a grave threat to their own interests. And the fact that we have this longstanding proxy war with Iran has really prevented any sort of constructive engagement on solving the problems that are going on in Iraq, and instead you have a kind of willful denial about the actual common strategy that is currently taking place.
Erin Evers talking:
what we’re seeing right now already, actually, is that these kinds of abuses are really radicalizing and ostracizing the Sunni population even more than they already were. So, people that we talked to on the ground who were displaced by the fighting, who were displaced by militias who threatened them with death if they tried to come back to their homes, are essentially now—you’ve got thousands of people displaced as a result of these militia operations who are literally geographically stuck between ISIS on one side, whose ideology they don’t accept and who they don’t want to be a part of, but who do not have a sectarian mandate to kill them and who haven’t specifically threatened to kill them like the sectarian militias have. And so, our concern is that for every tactical gain that the Shia militias are making against ISIS, in the long run they’re actually empowering ISIS and emboldening ISIS and throwing people straight into their hands.
So, the way that I see things going, from my experience on the ground, from what we documented in Amerli and Diyala and other areas all around Iraq, is that if things keep going this way and that if militias keep leading the fight, essentially, you’re going to have a state that is a militia state with a large, you know, kind of swath of territory that militias control, Sunnis kind of hiding in the western corner, and ISIS a problem that is never really fully dealt with, because—you know, because a sectarian—there’s no sectarian solution to the ISIS problem. You can’t get rid of all of the Sunnis in Iraq. They are part of Iraq. And, you know, most kind of average Iraqis don’t want to see the country split up. So, I think that it’s—I think that it poses a huge problem, both politically and in terms of security for Iraq’s future.
US worried about the weapons they’re now transferring to Iraq, in a sort of rushed emergency program, being put into the wrong hands, so they’d like to exempt themselves from those legal obligations. I think it’s ironic that, you know, having flooded the country once with weapons by destroying and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army and then flooding it again with weapons by arming this hastily prepared army and police in response to the insurgency, which is weapons that have now fallen in the hands of ISIS. This, the third solution, is to, again, flood more weapons into the country. And I think it just shows the lack of imagination that exists on the part of the policymakers who are responsible for dealing with these problems.
President Ghani is going to be calling for more troops and more money. He understands that the Afghan state is utterly dependent on international funding. The budget gap is extraordinary. It’s something like 20 percent of the country’s GDP right now that’s being spent by the international community on the armed forces alone. So, basically, Afghanistan is going to remain a client state of the United States and the international community for a long time to come, especially if the conflict isn’t brought to some sort of negotiated solution. And Ghani is basically trying to undo the damage that President Karzai did to that relationship, that really threatened a total cutoff of, if not aid, but troops.
— source democracynow.org
Matthieu Aikins, award-winning foreign correspondent. His latest article for Rolling Stone is “Inside Baghdad’s Brutal Battle Against ISIS.”
Erin Evers, Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. She co-wrote the new report, “After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli.” She has been on the ground in Iraq with Human Rights Watch since September 2012.