The family flew to Munich by private jet (file picture) CREDIT: RaptTV/Corbis RF Stills

Female Genital Mutilation has not been mandated either by the Quran or Hadith but still it is practiced in Arab and African Muslim communities. The practice leaves many girls traumatised for life. Many of them die to the complications arising out of circumcision. But still the practice is alive more due to the male chauvinism than to its religious sanction.

On October 9, a man called Basoz Q and his wife Shwana Q fled with his 12 year son and 7 year old daughter to Germany and sought asylum there. The man told the Immigration that his father-in-law insisted that his wife and 7 year old daughter be circumcised. His father-in-law was threatening them in case they did not comply to the “Islamic law” of female genital mutilation. They finally sold their family restaurant at £55000 and fled to Germany on a private jet.

This incident is a glaring example of how Islamic male chauvinism has reduced women to a sex object under the cover of Islamic law. In Ancient Arab society, women were forced to undergo genital cutting to lessen their sexual desire to prevent tbem from adultery or extramarital affair. They believed that if they were not circumcised they would have a greater or more intense sexual urge which would lead them to licentiousness or adultery.

Islam did not make female genital mutilation mandatory. Neither Quran nor hadiths make FMG mandatory for Muslims. But the advocates of FMG insist that there are some hadiths that support it. Below are the hadiths:

1) “Abu Hurairah said, I heard the Prophet pbuh say, ” The Fitrah is five things — or five things are the part of Fitrah — circumcision, shaving the pubes, trimming the moustache, cutting the nails and plucking the armpit hairs.”(Bukhari: 5891, Muslim: 527)

This hadith is obviously about male circumcision but the supporters of FMG cite this hadith in support of FMG.

2) Abul Malih ibn Usama’s father relates that the Prophet pbuh said, “Circumcision is a law for men and a preservation of honour for women.” (Ahmad ibn Hanbal: 5:75 Abu Dawud Adab 167).

This hadith also does not make FMG mandatory for women in clear words. For men, the hadith makes circumcision mandatory by saying “circumcision is a law for men” while for women it does not say it is a law but only a means of preserving a woman’s honour.

3) Narrated Umm Atiyyah al Ansariyyah,”A woman used to perform circumcision in Madina. The prophet said to her, “Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.”(Sunan Abu Dawud 41:525)

This hadith clearly discourages FMG.

The female genital circumcision was prevalent in pre-Islam Arab and African society and so the Prophet pbuh did not oppose it openly and strictly but discouraged it because it was painful and also deprived a woman and her husband of the true sexual pleasure. In the hadith qouted above hints towards this fact. But the advocates of FMG stress the part “Do not cut severely” suggesting that the Prophet pbuh only said “Do not cut severely” and did not forbid cutting” and ignored the part “it is better for a woman and her husband”.

The hadith makes it clear that the Prophet pbuh saw the practice as a mere regional cultural practice and that’s why he pbuh did not make female genital mutilation a law for all the Muslims..

Female Genital Mutilation is prevalent as an Islamic practice in the African countries where the Muims have extremist ideas about Islam. It is the Muslims of the African countries who are spreading extremist ideas in immigrant Muslim population in European countries. They believe that FMG is an Islamic law and should be practiced even at the cost of the life of women.

Therefore, thousands of girls of immigrant families in European countries are victims of forced FMG though in France and Britain FMG/C is illegal. These families are mostly from African and Asian countries. Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia are some of the countries where female genital cutting is common. And immigrants coming from these countries bring this custom with them and insist on it despite the fact that FMG is illegal in these countries. They say it is their religious duty and therefore they violate the law of their adopted country. There are about 5, 00, 000 victims of FMG across Europe and there has been an increase of 20% in the number in recent years. There are many European and Asian countries where FMG is not considered a religious duty and women there are not forced to undergo female genital cutting. Women in these counties enjoy their womanhood equally with their husbands. The Quran and hadith also preach men to like for their women what they like for themselves.

The incident of the Iraqi couple fleeing to a Christian country from an Islamic country only due to their father/father-in-law who threatened them with dire consequences if they did no agree on FMG brings the harms of extremist beliefs and practices prevalent in contemporary Muslim societies. These obscurantist Muslims have made life hell for their own kith and kin.

It is no surprise then that Germany has also decided to crack down on practitioners of FMG in the country and save women and girls from falling victims of a pre-Islam practice that threatened their life and caused them life long psychological and physical pain.

This article was first published on https://www.newageislam.com/

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Joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize: Nadia Murad (left) with Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege. EPA-EFE/Stephanie Lecocq

Mukwege is “the helper” who has provided medical care and surgery for thousands of survivors of sexual violence in his country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In 1999 he founded the Panzi Hospital that’s become known for its comprehensive support to over 48,482 survivors of sexual violence.

Mukwege´s response to the Nobel Committee was both a call to action and a promise to all survivors of sexual violence that
 

the world refuses to sit idly in the face of your suffering.

For her part, Murad is “the witness”. A young woman from the Yazidi community in northern Iraq, she was abducted and held captive by the Islamic State just over four years ago. Now she’s a global voice against sexual violence, human trafficking and genocide. Murad displays relentless courage as an author, human rights activist, and story teller. As a survivor of human trafficking and sexual violence, she has challenged the UN, national governments, and international organisations to take action to ensure that she truly is “The Last Girl” to experience such horrors.

The recognition of the role played by these two people matters enormously in strengthening the campaign against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Although this isn’t a new concept, it’s nevertheless taken an eternity to be acknowledged.

Patterns

Forms of conflict-related sexual violence include – but are not limited to – rape, forced pregnancy, slavery and torture.

Sexual violence can serve the purpose of humiliation, rewarding recruits, instilling fear or as a mechanism of ethnic cleansing. As such, it can become widespread, systematic and organised; or targeted, indiscriminate, opportunistic and merely tolerated; or a combination of both.

Patterns of sexual violence in wartime are extraordinarily varied and complex. It’s often perpetrated by a few armed actors, rather than all of them. The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict data set shows that not all armed groups commit this violence.

My own research has provided additional insights. I reviewed post-war sexual violence reports between 1989 and 2011, of 23 armed actors in sub-Saharan Africa. Five didn’t have any sexual violence events attributed to them following settlement. Only eight were reported as responsible for 68% of abuses and assaults.

Reliance on material benefits is one explanation for brutal behaviour against unarmed civilians. Living in an area with valuable commodities and natural resources has often been associated with the prevalence of wartime sexual violence. For example, in eastern DRC, the presence of minerals has contributed to organised armed violence, wartime rape and other forms of sexual violence.

This is backed up by research which has found a higher risk of experiencing sexual violence outside of domestic relations, in close proximity to mines and armed actors. One factor seems to be that easy access to weapons, lootable resources, and financing seems to make armed groups more organisationally incoherent. This means that they are prone to under-investing in discipline. In turn this leads to forced recruitment and other cheap and coercive means for mobilisation. Leaders who don’t need civilian support or who have abducted their foot soldiers, strikingly, seem to enable gang rape as a form of socialisation within the ranks.
 

The burden

Other forms of violence in wartime can linger in the bodies and psyches of men and women for a long time. However, while soldiers are recognised for their heroism or courage, recompensed with a pension or integrated into a new army, survivors of sexual violence are silenced and ignored.

And yet many cannot bear children and are cast out of their communities as “polluted” or “unmarriageable”. They suffer from disease, chronic illness and complicated sexual and reproductive health concerns. They must endure long-term, recurrent depression and anxiety, among many psycho-social-spiritual costs. They are made to feel worthless, disposable to society, marginal. They are often poorer, less able or likely to access education, training and opportunities.

These consequences intersect with social and familial constraints – stigma, impoverishment, alienation, fragmentation – which can accompany war and humanitarian crisis and have particularly negative consequences for survivors of sexual violence.
 

Addressing the costs

In the absence of structures and institutions and processes to address these consequences, Mukwege and Murad strive to shift stigma and shame away from the survivors, and to call on all to respond with social justice.

Mukwege’s work at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, in South Kivu, is increasingly taken up with more than general medicine. The foundation that grew from this facility now also provides social, economic, judicial and psychological assistance.

For its part, the Nadia Initiative works with advocacy tools to make life in the Sinjar province in northern Iraq of the Yazidi community possible, and to seek justice for sexual violence survivors.

Both Nobel laureates are highlighting the need to do more. Survivors and their communities deserve recognition for the atrocities that have been committed against them. But they also need material support in the form of services and fundamental human rights and justice.
A Nobel Prize for this work means recognising sexual violence as a weapon of war. But Mukwege and Murad probably don’t want us to stop there. After all, they and the women and men they champion need resources for health care, education and legal assistance and post-conflict reconstruction. Just as their bodies and spirits need healing, so do their countries and communities.

Research assistants Christiana Lang and Chiara Tulp contributed to this article.
 

Angela Muvumba Sellström, Researcher, Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) – USPC

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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From macabre hide-and-seek exercises, in which children hunt and kill enemy prisoners in specially constructed mazes, to the mass execution and decapitation of adult soldiers, young people living under IS have been indoctrinated and encouraged to engage in violence.

Meanwhile, IS’s quasi-government instituted an education system explicitly aimed at indoctrinating and weaponising the children living under it.

Mathematics was practised by determining how many more fighters IS has than an opposing force. Chemistry was taught by discussion of methods of gas inhalation. And physical education focused on the correct body positions for firing various weapons.

Their education has been compounded by the retaliatory and sometimes excessive violence of the vast array of forces committed to destroying IS. Through this, children have been exposed to horrific violence on a daily basis – thus generating trauma and, undoubtedly, genuine long-term grievances.
 

How IS’s use of child soldiers differs

There is a fundamental difference between IS’s use of child soldiers and the practice elsewhere.

IS hasn’t just recruited child soldiers. It systematically militarised the education systems of captured Iraqi and Syrian territory to turn the region’s children into ideological timebombs.

These children, saturated in IS’s particular brand of violent and uncompromising “religious” instruction from about the age of five, were trained in the use of small arms before their teenage years. They constitute a new challenge for the international community.

IS’s state-building efforts appear to have been thwarted for now. But saving the children exposed and potentially indoctrinated in its ideology is key to avoiding further terror attacks in the West, tackling the root causes of regional upheaval, and working toward a future where children play instead of fight, and schools teach instead of drill.
 

What children have been taught

Military activity, superiority based on IS’s interpretation of Islam, and the need to defeat unbelievers are embedded in its school textbooks.

Various videos, produced both through journalistic investigation and by IS itself, show the more practical side of education under the group’s rule. Children are taught how to fire small arms and use hand grenades.

Although IS extensively forced children into its ranks, many joined voluntarily – with or without their families’ blessing. But, in the long term, it doesn’t matter whether a child is forcibly recruited or not. And this is the matter of gravest concern.

IS’s primary concern is building and maintaining the children’s loyalty. The phrase “cubs of the caliphate” is a microcosm of how it views them. Cubs are unruly, ill-disciplined and dependent on strong (sometimes violent) guidance from their elders.

However, with time, resources and patience they can turn into a generation of fighters and idealists who will foster IS’s ideology even if its current military setbacks prove terminal.
 

Programs need to take a new approach

Disarmament, demobilisation and rehabilitation programs designed to reintegrate child soldiers into post-conflict society have significantly progressed in recent years. This represents the continued evolution of military-civil partnerships in the quest for a conflict-free world.

But IS’s systematic and meticulous radicalisation of an entire region’s children presents new challenges.

It’s understandable to interpret IS’s rapid retreat as its death knell, and thereby view traditional rehabilitation techniques as an appropriate remedy for yet another region recovering from violence at the hands of a radical armed insurgency. However, this conflict has been highly unusual in its pace, tactics and impacts – both now and potentially in the future.

So, we must revisit the fundamental assumptions of what it means to inspire peace within a society. This starts with the children subjected to the ideological extremism of IS and other armed groups.

If there is to be sustainable peace in the areas liberated from IS control, rehabilitation programs must be viewed as a community-wide process. Even if children did not directly participate in IS activities, the group has moulded their worldview and underpinning life philosophies.

Such philosophies may be especially productive in a region where resentment of perceived foreign – Western – interference and exploitation is long-lasting and multifaceted.
 

What can be done

The regular processes of identifying child combatants, disarming and reintegrating them into their communities through rehabilitation (such as by ensuring they are physically and mentally capable of rejoining their communities) and reconciliation (developing peace, trust and justice among children and their communities) are all necessary. But they are vastly insufficient in this instance.

Rarely has there been such systematic youth radicalisation and militarisation. So, the international response must be equally far-reaching and methodical.

Rapid reimplementation and revisiting of pre-IS school curricula is of the highest priority. National and local governments should ensure children are shielded from further recruitment by instituting a curriculum drawn from principles of tolerance and inclusion.

It’s essential to develop locally run initiatives to measure the level of radicalisation among a community’s children and to construct child-friendly spaces for young people to socialise, reconnect with their wider community and “unlearn” what they adopted under IS.

Such practices will help to heal the wounds of IS occupation and ensure the potential for cyclical violence is removed. Done right, it will hinder IS’s ability to rise anew.

James S. Morris, PhD Student in International Security and Child Rights, The University of Queensland and Tristan Dunning, Lecturer in Modern Middle East History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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(Photo: Jordi Bernabeu Farrús / Flickr)

The Middle East today is enduring a replay of World War II — with the Islamic State in the role of Nazi Germany.

Having seized much of Europe and parts of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany reached the peak of its expansion by the fall of 1942. Then, stopped at Stalingrad and unable to overwhelm Britain, the Nazis began to fall back, and the war turned into a race between the Soviet troops marching from the east and the Allied soldiers surging from the west. After the war, as a result of the competition between these two sets of armed forces, Europe would remain divided for the next half century.

The Islamic State likewise reached its peak expansion in mid-2014 when it controlled large chunks of Iraq and Syria. It has experienced a rise and fall even more precipitous than the Nazis’. By mid-2016, a mere two years later, it had already lost 45 percent of its territory in Syria and 20 percent of its territory in Iraq.

Today, with the fall of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State has dwindled to a swath of land around the border of the two countries. Once a “state” of 11 million people with an economy worth about $1 billion a year — the size of Great Britain, the population of Greece, the economic output of Gambia — ISIS is now little more than the several thousand fighters desperately fending off attacks from all sides. From the west, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad is attempting to retake as much of Syria as it can. From the east, Iraqi forces and Kurdish peshmerga operating under the cover of U.S. air support have been steadily ejecting the would-be caliphate from Iraqi territory.

In both Iraq and Syria, significant divisions exist among the anti-ISIS fighters. Indeed, the lands encompassing Iraq and Syria would be lucky to experience the frozen hatreds of a Cold War in the wake of the fall of the house of ISIS. The shrinking of the caliphate will more likely lead to a new level of fighting — over the future structure of both Iraq and Syria and, more ominously, the dispensation of the region as a whole.

In Syria
It not only feels like 1945 in Syria, it looks that way as well. After months of saturation bombing, the cities that ISIS once controlled look like Germany after it had been reduced to rubble in the final months of World War II, as the Allies and the Soviets tightened their vise grip on the Nazis.

Thanks to the help of both Russia and Iran and to its ruthless aerial campaign, the Syrian government has managed to regain 60 percent of the country. Syrian forces have continuously bombed civilian targets, such as hospitals. Of the 1,373 attacks on civilian infrastructure in 2016, for instance, Syrian and Russian forces were responsible for 1,198. Last month, September, registered the largest number of casualties for 2017, with nearly 1,000 civilians killed, including over 200 children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Assad regime has specialized in the comparatively low-tech barrel bombs, which maximize civilian casualties, dropping nearly 13,000 of them in 2016.

The U.S.-led coalition, meanwhile, has been equally brutal in its effort to dislodge the Islamic State from its capital of Raqqa. The city now looks like Dresden after the firebombing of World War II, as the Russian government has rightly pointed out. According to Syrian activists, over 1,000 civilians died in the bombing.

The third leg of brutality in Syria is Sunni extremism. True, ISIS is on the decline. But other militant forces aspire to kick Assad aside, keep the Kurds down, and beat back the Americans, Russians, and Iranians. After several name changes, the latest collection of al-Qaeda-like factions in Syria — which may or may not maintain a link to al-Qaeda itself — is the Levant Liberation Committee (Tahrir al-Sham or HTS). With its ISIS rival shrinking daily, HTS could emerge as the insurgency of choice for those who hate Assad as well as anything associated with the Americans.

Large tracts of ISIS territory in Syria were thinly populated desert, but the caliphate possessed some jewels in their crown. This weekend, on the heels of the liberation of Raqqa, U.S.-backed militias took over the Islamic State’s largest oil field. Syrian government forces were reportedly within a few miles of the strategic asset, but were pushed back by ISIS fighters. The Syrian Democratic Forces that took over the Omar oil field are led by Kurds, but some of the soldiers are also Arab. Although the SDF as a whole is putatively fighting for a secular democratic Syria, the Kurds are more pragmatically trying to gain leverage to safeguard their gains in the north where they have established the de facto autonomous region of Rojava.

Hatred of ISIS has been the lowest common denominator for a broad range of actors in Syria, from American neocons and Syrian generals to Kurdish militias and al-Qaeda sympathizers to Kremlin geopoliticians and Hezbollah. ISIS has been a knife stuck deep into Syria. There’s no argument that the knife is life threatening. But remove it, and Syria risks bleeding out.

In Iraq
On his recent swing through the Persian Gulf, where he failed to get Qatar and Saudi Arabia to kiss and make up, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also made some especially ill-conceived comments about Iraq.

“Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against Daesh and ISIS is coming to a close, those militias need to go home,” he said.

There aren’t any Iranian militias in Iraq. The Popular Mobilization Forces that have played a major role in pushing the Islamic State out of Iraq are largely Shiite, but they also contain Sunnis and Christians. Many of the brigades in this coalition force have links to Iran, but at least one major unit so far has been incorporated into the Iraqi army. In other words, the so-called “Iranian militias” are already home. They’re Iraqis, after all.

Tillerson also said, “Any foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home, and allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their lives with the help of their neighbors.” Was Tillerson announcing that all U.S. soldiers currently in Iraq — 5,262 according to the Pentagon, but possibly as high as 7,000 — are about to go home? If so, everyone in the media and the U.S. government seems to have missed this second “mission accomplished” announcement.

Thanks largely to the United States and its earlier decision to invade and occupy the country, Iraq faces the same kind of fragmentation problem as Syria. Iraqis have divided loyalties. Now that the acute threat of ISIS has passed, the fissures in Iraqi society are once again widening.

Consider the ongoing conflict between Kurdistan and the central government in Baghdad. The residents of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq went to the polls last month and overwhelmingly endorsed independence. The central government immediately went on the offensive, putting economic pressure on the wayward province and sending army units to seize the disputed oil-rich region around the city of Kirkuk. With ISIS on the decline, anti-Kurdish sentiment can unite the rest of Iraq. As Juan Cole points out, the Kurdish move brought out Iraqi nationalism even in the Shiite militias that helped the Iraqi army retake Kirkuk.

In retrospect, Kurdistan President Mahmoud Barzani’s bid to use the independence referendum to boost his own political fortunes was, according to veteran Kurdish politician Mahmoud Osman, a “miscalculation.” It may revive Iraqi nationalism and thwart Kurdish aspirations. Or it could trigger more centrifugal forces. With ISIS on its way out and the U.S. military presence relatively modest, Iraqis may well turn back to their post-invasion preoccupation of fighting each other to the point of the country’s dissolution.

After ISIS
The war against ISIS is like a matryoshka “nesting doll” from hell. The campaign against the caliphate is inset in the larger Syrian civil war and the Iraqi federal conflict. These are in turn nested within a larger confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And this regional tug-of-war is itself part of an even larger competition for influence between the United States and Russia.

Now, imagine giving this matryoshka doll to a six-year-old child prone to tantrums. Enter Donald Trump. He has done just about everything he can to make a bad situation worse short of destroying the doll with nuclear weapons. He has antagonized the Iranians at every turn, encouraged the worst tendencies of the Saudis, done little to keep Iraq together, made no effort to push the warring sides in Syria back to the negotiating table, and pursued a woefully inconsistent policy toward Russia.

Yes, the looming defeat of ISIS is to be cheered, but the costs have been huge. There’s the enormous loss of civilian life and the destruction of ancient cities. There’s the uptick in ISIS attacks abroad. Iraq remains fragile, though the Kurds have offered to freeze their independence vote. Syria is no closer to an end to its civil war, though more rounds of peace talks are set to begin shortly. Human rights violations by the Assad government continue, though the first trials have taken place in Europe to hold those responsible for those violations.

Most importantly, no one is tackling the nested conflicts in the region. The first step is to take the matryoshka doll out of Donald Trump’s hands. Give him something else to play with, perhaps another tour of his favorite campaign stops in the United States. Then let some real adults — the UN, the EU, Jimmy Carter? — grapple with the post-ISIS realities of the Middle East.
 

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Although it was never quite clear what the September 25 referendum was intended to achieve, one thing’s for sure: while the Iraqi government, neighbouring states, regional powers and the international community were all against it from the off, the people of Iraqi Kurdistan have voted on self-determination and given a very clear mandate for independence.

It only takes a short stay in Iraqi Kurdistan to conclude that a separation from the rest of Iraq seems inevitable, thanks to both the long-held Kurdish desire for a homeland and the different trajectories that Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq have followed now for more than a quarter of a century.

Barring diplomatic, economic, or even military action by Iraq or other states, the next step envisioned by Kurdistan’s president, Masoud Barzani, is to enter into negotiations with the Iraqi federal government over Kurdistan’s future status. Since the federal government would have to relinquish its sovereign claim over Kurdistan in order for it to become a state, Kurdistan’s path to independence travels through, and is dependent upon, Baghdad.

But just because separation is inevitable doesn’t mean achieving it will be easy. An independent Kurdistan will present problems for other states with secessionist movements and will immediately confront severe challenges of its own.
 

Feeling the pinch

The most pressing problem that an independent Kurdistan would face is how to fund itself. Much of Kurdistan’s domestic economy is dependent on Turkey, which has threatened to cut off the flow of goods and stop exporting oil because of the referendum. Iraqi Kurdistan also currently receives approximately 13-17% of the national Iraqi budget. This funding has been a source of continued dispute, but is vital to Kurdistan maintaining its government and services. Advocates for independence make much of the potential financial windfall from oil production, but with oil prices low and political turmoil running high, the Kurdistan market is less and less attractive for international investors
.
In fact, since 2014, Kurdistan has been struggling with a long-term financial crisis. The costs of war with the so-called Islamic State (IS), an influx of refugees and a decline in oil revenues have combined to undermine the government’s budget. Since 2015 government salaries have gone unpaid or been cut. These would be onerous problems indeed for a new independent state to confront.

Raising the roof. EPA/Gailan Haji

This year’s referendum was a vote for the people of Iraqi Kurdistan as well as four Kurdish controlled regions within Iraq: Kirkuk, Makhmour, Sinjar and Khanaqin. Although these regions are currently controlled from Erbil, they are also claimed by Baghdad.

The perilous state of finances in Kurdistan mean Kirkuk in particular is vital. A multi-ethnic city, Kirkuk sits next to one of the largest oil fields in Iraq, and contestation over who it belongs to has long been a concern. Kurdistan has controlled it since 2014, but the decline of the IS threat in Iraq would allow Baghdad to commit military resources to reclaiming the city and its oil fields.
One issue that any negotiation between Baghdad and Erbil would have to resolve is the status of these oil resources. A peaceful resolution to this land and resource dispute would do much to allow Kurdistan to split from Iraq in an amicable fashion. But looking at a map of north and central Iraq, Kirkuk is only one of many potential flashpoints in the disputed territories that ring the borders of Kurdistan from Mosul to Tuz Khurmatu.
 

Marching up the hill

Even among Iraqi Kurds, the referendum in Kurdistan was not universally supported. Some parties argued that the timing of the referendum was wrong; others raised concerns that President Barzani was using the referendum to safeguard his own political future. It was not clear until the day of the referendum whether the polls would open in Kirkuk or not.

Further, Kurdistan is not just populated by Kurds – and many (including Iran and Turkey) are concerned for the status and future of Arabs, Turkmen, and other minority groups. Incorporating non-Kurds into a territory so closely associated with Kurdish identity and longstanding calls of Kurdish nationalism will be an obstacle that a Kurdistan outside of Iraq will have to address if it wishes to remain stable.

Something’s in the air in Erbil. EPA/Gailan Haji

Beyond that, though, the heightened sense of Kurdish nationalism amongst the Kurds themselves may have been necessary for mobilisation of society behind a yes vote, but it will also have to be carefully navigated by the Kurdistan government. In the run-up to the referendum, Barzani made clear and strong statements that Kurdistan would not stay within Iraq and that it would not be controlled by outside powers. But what happens if the promises of independent statehood cannot be realised?

The negotiations between Erbil and Baghdad carry no guarantees. If they want to avoid crisis, Barzani and his fellow leaders will need to engage in long-term and very careful politics with both Baghdad and Kurdistan’s population – if they’re mobilised and marched to the top of the hill, it could be dangerous to try to march them back down.

As things stand, all involved must confront two difficult facts. First, it is not easy or straightforward to become a new sovereign state and, second, any resolution to the question of Iraqi Kurdistan is still a long way off. The independence referendum has presented an optimistic future, but there are plenty of obstacles in the way.
 

Rebecca Richards, Lecturer in International Relations, Keele University and Robert Smith, Lecturer in International Relations, Coventry University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Index of the new Iraqi textbook – minus the chapter on evolution

Among the complainers, Dr Mohammed Fawzi, who studied genetic engineering, bioinformatics and biotechnology at Bahgdad University, posted this sarcastic comment in Arabic on Facebook:
 

We congratulate our people on deleting the chapter on evolution from the sixth grade textbook,  because we have no need to evolve. Backwardness is beautiful!
Congratulations to us on our stance against the greatest scientific truths. Then come those who say: “Why are our people backward?”

Photographs of the revised textbook’s index page have been circulating on the internet. They show it contains chapters on cells, tissue, reproduction, embryology and genetics. 

The omitted chapter had four sections, according to school student Abdulrahman al-Makhzomy who has a copy of the old textbook:
 

• An introduction to evolution
• The idea of organic evolution
• Evidence of evolution
• Mechanism of evolution

The education ministry ought to be modernising teaching methods in Iraq and giving students a better understanding of science, “but what we are seeing is the contrary of that”, Makhzomy wrote in a post on Medium.

Deletion of the chapter seems to be partly to appease religious sensitivities but it may also signal official recognition of everyday realities in Iraq. In practice most teachers already avoid discussing evolution in class on the grounds that it conflicts with Islam, some dismiss it as just a theory and only a few teach it properly, Makhzomy told al-bab. The ministry had previously reduced the number of marks allocated to evolution in exams.

In 2014, ISIS/Daesh ordered drastic changes to the curriculum for parts of Iraq that were under its control. These included removing references to Darwinism and evolution from science books and replacing them with statements that God was the creator of everything. 

Historically, Islam’s relationship with science has been less problematic than that of Christianity, and Iraq under the Abbasid caliphs was renowned as a centre of scientific knowledge. 

Publication of Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859 drew a variety of responses from Muslims – some predictable, some less so. One early Muslim critique – from Jamal al-Din Afghani in 1881 – cited the continued existence of male foreskins as evidence that Darwin’s ideas on natural selection must be wrong: “Is this wretch [Darwin] deaf to the fact that the Arabs and Jews for several thousand years have practised circumcision, and despite this until now not a single one of them has been born circumcised?”

On the other hand, Hussein al-Jisr, a nineteenth-century Lebanese Shia scholar who advocated combining religious education with modern science, saw room for an accommodation between evolution and scripture. “There is no evidence in the Qur’an,” he wrote, “to suggest whether all species, each of which exists by the grace of God, were created all at once or gradually.”

Some Muslims even went so far as to claim that Darwin’s ideas had Islamic roots.

Widespread rejection of evolution by Muslims seems to be a fairly recent development, probably influenced by the spread of religiosity but also by ideas from American Christian creationists. It’s an area where Arab schools, universities and media nowadays tread warily and often timidly for fear of provoking complaints. (This is discussed in more detail here, in a chapter from my book, Arabs Without God.)

Iraq is not an exceptional case. In other Arab countries teaching about evolution can range from  cautious to non-existent. Ahmad Saeed, a Yemeni, recalled that his biology textbook contained a chapter on natural selection which students were told to ignore.
Mohammed Ramadan, who studied at a state school in Egypt, said:
 

“They have a chapter [in the textbook] – the final chapter – and it’s all done in a kind of comic way. Most of it doesn’t come in the exams, but if it does it’s mostly about the birds that migrated from certain places and how they changed their colours – a very, very superficial concept of evolution. Some of the teachers accept that evolution may happen through adaptation but they say even if it’s likely to happen in animals it won’t happen in humans, because humans are special.”

Egyptian universities are “not exactly crawling” with evolutionists either, according to Nour Youssef in a post on the Arabist blog: “Professors almost always introduce the subject as an obsolete, wrong theory, misrepresent it and then conclude with things like: Why are monkeys still around if we came from them?”

In 2010, a study of evolution teaching in the Middle East found striking differences between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Its author, Elise Burton, cited a two-page section on “The Origin of Humanity” in the highest-level biology textbook used in Saudi schools which presented evolution theory as a form of blasphemy:
 

“In the West appeared what is called ‘the theory of evolution’, which was derived by the Englishman Charles Darwin, who denied Allah’s creation of humanity, saying that all living things and humans are from a single origin. We do not need to pursue such a theory because we have in the Book of Allah the final say regarding the origin of life, that all living things are Allah’s creation.”

The book went on to suggest that Darwin’s theory is now largely discredited:
 

“Due to this theory’s deviant character and its contradictions to intuition and reason, there were many Western scientists who stood against it and exposed its fallacies in scientific research and rational inferences …”

On the other hand, Burton found the treatment of evolution in Iranian textbooks was far more straightforward:
 

“An especially telling comparison between the Iranian and Saudi advanced biology textbooks emerges in the characterisation of Darwin and his contemporaries, and the development of support for Darwin’s ideas by later scientists. The Iranian textbook humanises Darwin with a relatively detailed account of his life and a discussion of its historical context …
“Fascinatingly, where the Saudi textbook dismisses evolution as fraudulent science, the Iranian text announces ‘nearly all biologists today have accepted that Darwin’s theory can explain the basis of diversity of life on earth’.”

However, Burton noted that while Iranian textbooks accepted that natural selection applies to humans, they avoided “explicit attempts to place humans within the larger picture of the evolution of life”. (Among Muslims who accept evolution in general there is a common belief that humans, unlike all other forms of life, did not evolve but were created.)

Burton suggested several factors that could explain these Saudi-Iranian differences – including social differences and differing historical experiences. Clearly, though, theological differences and the ways that religion is organised in these two countries plays an important part. The wahhabi/salafi version of sunni Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia is especially rigid while shia Islam, which dominates in Iran is a lot more flexible in its approach to interpreting scripture.

Iraq, with a mixed sunni-shia population falls somewhere in between – which may be another reason why the education ministry, rather than taking sides, prefers to keep evolution out of the classroom.

Courtesy: Al Bab
 

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A U.S. soldier stands guard duty near a burning oil well in the Rumaila oil field in 2003.
Photo Credit: Arlo K. Abrahamson / U.S. Navy

On 10 July 2017, Iraqi’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in the city of Mosul to declare it liberated from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Brigadier General Yahya Rasool, spokesperson of the Iraqi forces, told Iraqi television, ‘Their fictitious state has fallen.’

Prime Minister al-Abadi has been a senior member of one Iraqi government after the other since the illegal US invasion and occupation of that country in 2003. He was dismayed by the privatization plans of the US Viceroy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, and he participated in the lawsuit against the US mercenary army – the private company called Blackwater. At the same time, al-Abadi participated in governments led largely by his Islamic Dawa Party (which he joined in 1967 at the age of fifteen). This party has overseen – with US aid and encouragement – the breakdown of Iraqi society. The brutality of the US invasion and occupation as well as the sectarian policies of the Islamic Dawa Party drove the creation of ISIS in 2006 and then its expansion by 2014. This is a man with a front-row seat for the unraveling of his country.

What did al-Abadi see when he looked across the expanse of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities? He would have seen not only the violence visited by ISIS upon this historic city – including destroying a large part of its Great Mosque of al-Nuri – but also the destruction of the city by this current onslaught that has lasted nine months. A million civilians fled Mosul; many thousands of civilians have been killed. They live in nineteen emergency camps – each wanting in basic needs. ‘The levels of trauma we are seeing are some of the highest anywhere,’ said Lise Grande of the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. ‘What people have experienced is nearly unimaginable.’ The UN requested nearly $1 billion of the international community. It has received just over 40 per cent of what is required. With oil prices down, Iraq simply does not have the revenue to rebuild this destroyed city. It will need help.

Humanitarianism wars are easier to fund than the humanitarian peace.

‘Our city is in ruins,’ said Ayman who lives in the western part of Mosul. ‘They have treated us like we are absolutely nothing.’ Who is the ‘they’ in Ayman’s statement? ISIS surely, but also the Iraqi military and its US allies.

Ayman’s statement appears in an Amnesty International report that was released on 11 July – At Any Cost: The Civilian Catastrophe in West Mosul. It is a careful report, but with a point that should not be ignored. Amnesty suggests that the United States and the Iraqi forces ‘carried out a series of unlawful attacks in west Mosul.’ The report further says, ‘Even in attacks that seem to have struck their intended military target, the use of unsuitable weapons or failure to take other necessary precautions resulted in needless loss of civilian lives and in some cases appears to have constituted disproportionate attacks.’

The United States government attacked Amnesty for its conclusions. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend said, in Washington, ‘I reject any notion that coalition fires were in any way imprecise, unlawful or excessively targeted civilians.’

Airwars, the group that studies aerial bombardment, shows – in a new report – that the US aerial bombardment of western Mosul increased by 21 per cent in the past month, with the munitions concentrated on certain neighborhoods. This has led, Airwars says, to increased civilian deaths. Chris Woods of Airwars says, ‘The speed and intensity of these attacks – which the US now describes as a war of ‘annihilation’ – have placed civilians at far greater risk of harm. Heavy weapons also continue to be used on densely populated areas. The consequences are inevitable.’ Lt. General Townsend has not commented yet on the Airwars report. The term ‘annihilation’ is chilling.

The numbers put out by Airwars are deflated. ‘It is highly probable,’ the report notes, ‘that the death toll is substantially higher than this Airwars estimate, with multiple reports referencing thousands of corpses still trapped under the rubble.’ Reports from the ground suggest the use of illegal weapons – including white phosphorus (although the US has denied this) – as well as ‘horrific scenes of bodies scattering the streets.’ It will take a great deal of investigation to piece together the full-scale of the human tragedy first in the ISIS capture of Mosul and then in the US-Iraqi assault on the city.

Al-Abadi would also know that ISIS was able to expand in 2013 and 2014 partly because the Iraqi government crushed any attempt by ordinary Iraqis to get a better deal. A major political uprising from 2011 brought together groups such as the Union of the Unemployed of Iraq with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. Their demands were for the recreation of their destroyed society, for an economy that benefits Iraqis and for a political project that unifies the people and does not tear open sectarian divides. The government did not listen to them. The path of nonviolent resistance was blocked in 2011, and then sent backwards when Iraqi security forces massacred peaceful protestors in al-Hawija in April 2013. After the massacre, ISIS scouts came into al-Hawija to recruit fighters. They said, ‘You tried the peaceful route. What did it bring you? Now come with us.’ Many did. Al-Hawija remains in ISIS hands. In fact, after the apparent death of ISIS emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of al-Hawija – Abu Haitham al-Obaidi – declared that he was the new caliph. His forces are arrayed in the western part of al-Hawija, ready for a major battle.

Little wonder that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – Zeid al-Hussein – said that ‘dialogue between communities needs to begin now to try to halt the cycle of violence.’ Much water has slipped under the bridge. Not only the history of the brutality of the US invasion and occupation – which razed many of the cities in Anbar Province such as Fallujah and Ramadi – but also the ruthlessness of the Iraqi government as well as of the US-Iraqi war on Mosul. The way one fights a war suggests to the defeated the terms of the future. A brutal war can only mean that there will be no real ‘dialogue’ to prevent precisely the ‘cycle of violence.’
 

List of names of civilians injured in the Zanjili neighborhood in Raqqa (from the Facebook page of Yasin Mahmood)

ISIS fighters fled Mosul for other parts of Iraq as well as for Syria. The battle is far from over. US aerial assaults on the Syrian cities of Raqqa, Hasakah and Deir Ezzor continue, increasing with great ferocity. Airwars suggests that the number of civilian deaths from the US-led air war in Syria is at the highest it has been for a long while. What is most startling is the assertion by Airwars that ‘casualty events attributed to the [US-led] Coalition in Iraq and Syria outpaced those reportedly carried out by Russia in Syria’ for the sixth consecutive month. That means that the civilian toll from US airstrikes has been greater than the casualty toll from the Russian strikes. Yet it is the latter that gets the attention by the Western media, while the former is largely – if not entirely – ignored. There is a theory, as I have written about previously, that Western bombing is benevolent, whereas Eastern bombing is malevolent. This seems to operate for the Western media.

US bombing in Raqqa has hit civilian infrastructure – including internet cafes and swimming pools, shops and mosques. There are reports of civilians being killed as they flee Raqqa. Lt. General Stephen Townsend, who derided Amnesty’s allegations about war crimes in Mosul, told the New York Times’ Michael Gordon a few days ago, ‘And we shoot every boat we find. If you want to get out of Raqqa right now, you’ve got to build a poncho raft.’ This is a violation of the UN’s 1981 Protection of Asylum-Seekers in Situations of Large-Scale Influx.
Meanwhile, the de-escalation zones continue to be formed in Syria to the great relief of the population. It is the only glimmer of hope in the region. Most of these de-escalation zones are in western Syria, with the most recent declared along the Jordanian border, including the provinces of Dara’a, Quneitra and Sweida. The UN Refugee Agency – UNHCR – said that 440,000 internally displaced people have returned to their homes during the first six months of this year. Over 30,000 Syrians who had left the country have now returned home. Some of these ceasefires relied upon discussions between Iran and Qatar. It is clear that one of the reasons for Saudi Arabia’s annoyance with Qatar is that it has participated actively in the creation of these de-escalation zones. Expansion of this zone is essential for the well-being of the people.

It would be valuable if this example of the de-escalation zones would set the ethical foundation for peace-making in Iraq as well as in northeastern Syria. Total warfare wins battles, but it can often prolong the war.
 

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Freedom of thought needs an atmosphere of tolerance where people can speak their mind and no one is forced to accept the beliefs of others. In the Middle East, though, tolerance is in short supply and ideas that don't fit the expectations of society and governments are viewed as a threat.

Where religion is concerned, the "threat" can come from almost anyone with unorthodox ideas but especially from those who reject religion entirely.

Increasingly, atheists in Arab countries are characterised as dangerous extremists – to be feared no less than violent jihadists.

Persecuting atheists is the inevitable result of governments setting themselves up as guardians of faith. Among the 22 Arab League countries, Islam is "the religion of the state" in 16 of them: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the UAE and Yemen. 

For most of them, this is more than just a token gesture; it also serves political purposes. Embracing religion and posing as guardians of morality is one way for regimes to acquire some legitimacy, and claiming a mandate from God can be useful if they don't have a mandate from the public.

State religions, in their most innocuous form, signal an official preference for one particular kind of faith and, by implication, a lesser status for others. But the effects become far more obtrusive when governments rely on state religion as an aid to legitimacy – in which case the state religion has to be actively supported and policed. That, in turn, de-legitimises other belief systems and legitimises intolerance and discrimination directed against them. 

The policing of religion in Arab countries takes many forms, from governments appointing clerics and setting the theme for weekly sermons to the enforcement of fasting during Ramadan. 

To shield the government-approved version of religion from criticism, a variety of mechanisms can be deployed. These include laws against "defaming" religion and proselytising by non-Muslims but general laws regarding public order, telecommunications and the media may also apply.

In Algeria, for instance, the law forbids making, storing, or distributing printed or audiovisual materials with the intention of "shaking the faith" of a Muslim. In Oman, using the internet in ways that "might prejudice public order or religious values" is an imprisonable offence.

For Muslims who publicly abandon Islam the problem is even worse. In Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen anyone convicted of apostasy faces the threat – at least in theory – of execution.

Using a state religion as an aid to legitimacy turns the personal beliefs of individuals into a political issue, because disagreeing with the state's theological position also implies disloyalty to the state. Those who happen to disagree must either conform or risk becoming not only a religious dissident but a political one too.

Equating religious conformity with loyalty to the state allows Arab governments to label non-conformists not merely as dissidents but extremists. This in turn provides an excuse for suppressing them, as has been seen in Egypt with the Sisi regime's campaign against atheism and in Saudi Arabia where "promotion of atheist thought" became officially classified as terrorism.

Although Saudi Arabia's war on atheists stems from fundamentalist theology, in Egypt it's the opposite: the Sisi regime presents itself as a beacon of religious moderation. To describe the Sisi brand of Islam as moderate, though, is rather misleading. "Militantly mainstream" might be a better term. Theologically speaking it is middle-of the-road and relatively bland but also illiberal and authoritarian in character.

The result in Egypt is a kind of enforced centrism. While allowing some scope for tolerance – of other monotheistic religions, for example – the regime sets limits on discourse about religion in order to confine it to the middle ground. The main intention, obviously, was to place Islamist theology beyond the bounds of acceptability but at the other end of the spectrum it also means that atheism, scepticism and liberal interpretations of Islam have become forms of extremism.

Defining 'extremism'

Absurd as it might seem to place atheists in the same category as extremists such as terrorists and jihadists, the issue hinges on how "extremism" is defined: extreme in relation to what? Violent and intolerant extremism is a global phenomenon but confusion arises when governments try to define it by reference to national or culture-specific values.

Arab states are not the only offenders in this respect, though. They have been assisted by western governments defining "extremism" in a similar way – as rejection of a specific national culture rather than rejection of universal rights and international norms.

In its effort to prevent radicalisation of students, for example, the British government defined extremism as "vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values". Also in the context of eradicating extremism, the education minister talked about actively promoting "British values" in schools.

Approaching the problem in this way invites other countries to do likewise – even if their own national and cultural values would be considered extreme in relation to universal rights and international norms. Thus, Saudis can justifiably claim that atheism is contrary to fundamental Saudi values. Furthermore, the British minister's idea of instilling British values into British schoolchildren is not very different in principle from "instilling the Islamic faith" in young Saudis – which the kingdom's Basic Law stipulates as one of the main goals of education.

This article was first published on al-Bab.
 

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[Westminster Bridge Road, Westminster, London. Image by ktanaka via Wikimedia Commons]
 

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Members of the Saraya al-Khorasani militia on Baghdad streets

By Mustafa Habib in Baghdad (reposted from niqash.org)

In Baghdad, Jafar al-Aboudi’s son recently got into a fight with his neighbour at a local café. Al-Aboudi’s son ended up breaking the arm of the boy next door. After the incident the injured boy’s father appeared to be on the brink of going to settle the matter using tribal law. This would have meant that tribal elders in the area were approached and they would decide how much reparation – known as diyeh in Arabic – was needed to see justice done. Often this involves the perpetrator of the crime paying money to the victim.

To avoid this al-Aboudi decided to go instead to one of the militias that controlled their neighbourhood. The individual who manages the offices of the Shiite Muslim militia in their area managed to solve the problem. The two young men were brought together to shake hands and hug. The offender apologized and his father promised to pay for the victim’s medical expenses. In the end though, the victim and his father refused any money out of respect for the offices of the militia, who have played a crucial but sometimes controversial role in the fight against the extremist group known as the Islamic State.

There was no thought of going to the local police.

“The police are corrupt and they take bribes,” al-Aboudi explained his reasons for seeking justice elsewhere. “I am sure if I went to them my son would have ended up in prison for days while they tried to resolve the issue. They all want to make money out of every case rather than enforcing the law.”

"We care more about the safety of the people than the bureaucracy enacted by corrupt police officers"

The militia’s man in this area, Abbas al-Saadi, says that he and his group do not willingly interfere in police business. “But people often come to us and ask us to solve their problems; they don’t want to go to the police because they think they are corrupt,” al-Saadi told Niqash. “Every week we get locals coming to us with these issues and some of their problems are even with the local police.”  

A few days ago, his office was approached by a restaurant owner whose business is in Baghdad’s bustling Karrada area. “He told us a police officer was charging him protection money and forcing him to give him free food,” al-Saadi says. “We stopped this officer from blackmailing the restaurant owner. Even though the police cannot protect anyone or maintain security, they still extort the businesses. The government is aware of how corrupt the police are,” he maintains.

Most neighbourhoods in Baghdad now have a base – usually an office – belonging to whichever militia is present in that part of the city. This is also true for other southern provinces in Iraq. The militias sometimes work security and directly help local police, or they do other, more undercover work, where they and their informants roam streets, markets and residential areas in civilian clothing, watching out for terrorist activity.

The fact that the militias have played such an essential part in the fight against the extremist Islamic State, or IS, group over the past two years has made the groups very popular, especially among young local men. It is hard to join the army or the police and often requires that candidates bribe their way in to the regular wages. So it’s become more popular for young, unemployed men to join a militia instead.  

Additionally, it is also clear that often official security forces – and the local police forces in particular – have not been capable of protecting the cities in which they work from terrorist bomb attacks. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a series of suicide attacks targeting residential and commercial areas, just since the beginning of this year.  

Since 2006 security in Baghdad has been in the hands of the so-called Baghdad Operations Command. This body is tasked with keeping Baghdad secure and is composed of around 70,000 members drawn from the regular Iraqi army, military police and regular police as well as intelligence services.

However not many locals appear to think they are up to the job. Last week Mohamed al-Bayyat, a senior member of the Badr organization which is responsible for one of the larger militias, said that Baghdad’s official security forces had been infiltrated by “enemies” – by this he means extremists and terrorists. “The Baghdad Operations Command is unconstitutional,” al-Bayyat said in an official statement, that called upon the Iraqi government to rethink the capital’s security and “to involve the Shiite Muslim volunteer militias more in protecting Baghdad”.

This is not the first of these kinds of criticisms and doubtless it will not be the last time the two forces clash. In September 2016, there was even a physical clash. Shiite Muslim militias fought a battle against the local police in the Zafaraniyah area. The militias’ aim was to arrest police who were supposedly helping the Islamic State group, even though the local police denied this.

In November 2016, the Iraqi Parliament passed a law regarding the volunteer militias that had formed after the beginning of the security crisis in mid-2014. The militias were formed by volunteers who offered to fight the IS group and to protect their homes, in the face of the Iraqi army’s weakness. The new law has made the volunteer militias an official body – that is, no longer “volunteer” – but it has not specified what role the militias should play in the future. Would they be like the Iraqi army, called in to fight battles? Or would they be able to operate more like a local police force inside Iraqi cities? As yet, the answers are unclear.

"The police commander can't do his work if he doesn't cooperate with the local militias"

On the other side of the situation, the militias are making it increasingly difficult for local policemen to do their jobs properly. Senior police officers are forced to cooperate with the senior members of the militias that work in their areas, if those areas are under the police’ control at all.

“With any security-related issues, the police station has to coordinate with the militia offices in its area,” says Asaad al-Taei, a police officer working in the Karkh neighbourhood in western Baghdad. “The police commander cannot work if he doesn’t do this. And there are many other reasons why we cannot do our work properly.”

For instance, in some neighbourhoods there is more than one militia present and the police have to try and work with several different groups, al-Taei said. “We cannot hold them accountable for any violations they may commit either,” he told Niqash. “They move around in cars with tinted windows and without license plates. They carry personal IDs that may well be fake and the police at the checkpoints cannot just stop them.”

Civilians in Baghdad complain about the increasing security chaos and the fact that there is theft and kidnapping in broad daylight. They can’t understand why these culprits are not caught or how they manage to pass through so many official checkpoints on their way to and from the scene of the crime. But often the identification carried by the culprits is counterfeit. For instance, on 2 January this year an Iraqi woman was sentenced to five years in prison for impersonating a senior officer in the militias; she had 14 other fake ID cards with her when she was caught.

Sometimes the militias in one neighbourhood even fight one another and the police have to remain neutral – meaning they don’t stop the fighting. This is yet another sign of the waning power and prestige of local police and the waxing of the militia clout. The imbalance is such that some of the militia fighters appear to believe themselves above the law.  

Among the militias themselves the leaders say they respect the rule of law but that it is difficult to monitor their men, who are deployed all around Baghdad, let alone the men from other militias.

Late last year, the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who heads the Sadrist movement, of which the Saraya al-Salam militia is part, declared that everyone should respect the local security forces. “Nobody has the right to attack them, even under the banner of the militias,” he stated.

Nor is this problem limited to Iraq’s southern provinces, populated mainly by Shiite Muslim Iraqis. The Sunni-majority provinces are also experiencing difficulties with militias, as armed tribal groups take charge of security in provinces like Anbar and Salahaddin.

Majid al-Thayabi is a member of one these Sunni Muslim militias working in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. He acknowledges that the tribal militias are becoming stronger – but, he argues, this is because the police and the army are weak and there are not enough of them.

“People complain about the police being corrupt and they say the police refuse to arrest citizens who may be involved with terrorism,” al-Thayabi told Niqash. “We simply arrest them and we don’t worry too much about the rules. We care more about the safety of the people than the bureaucracy enacted by corrupt police officers.”  

Courtesy: al-bab.com

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