Iraq’s recent history has been plagued by the nightmares of botched foreign interventions, state failures, and violent religious discord. The protests that are unfolding now are merely the latest chapter in a tale of a broken system that finds itself teetering, caught between the whims of Iranian and US regimes as well as the bitterness of internal religious discord between Shia and Sunni Iraqis. It is hard to believe now, but Iraq used to be a haven of religious and ethnic diversity, with Christians, Jews, and various Muslim sects living side by side in the streets of cities such as Baghdad and Mosul.
The protests began in October, as Iraqis demonstrated against years of corruption, high unemployment, failing water and electricity services, and a rotten political system bequeathed by the US invasion in 2003. Many of those in the crowds were young Iraqis, mostly men but also women, who were simply seeking a better way of life for themselves and their families.
The diffuse and leaderless protests have been met with a brutal crackdown from the government – more than three hundred protestors have been killed since the 1st October. At least 15,000 more have been wounded, according to the Independent High Commission for Human Rights in Iraq.
The stiffening resolve of the authorities has produced some truly harrowing results. Security forces have resorted to firing on crowds not only with bullets but with canisters of tear gas. Reports from Human Rights Watch indicate that direct hits to the head from tear gas canisters have caused the deaths of several young men, the youngest of whom was a boy called Hassan, an orphan who was just fourteen years old.
Desperate to prevent such reports from leaving the country, the Iraqi government, like its Iranian counterpart, has now also shut down the internet.
Now, what began as an expression of socio-economic grievances has now transformed into a demand for constitutional shock therapy and political transformation. The protesters are now raging against the entirety of a sectarian political order propped up for so long by American troops, and whose highest ministers and military officials are under the influence of the Shia Iranian government.
In the protests, national flags have been flown alongside Kurdish and Shi'ite counterparts, a phenomenon suggestive of a gap in values between the generation of the established regime, many of whom are reliant upon sectarian militias, and the secular values of younger, but disempowered Iraqis. Many are now refusing to accept anything less than total political transformation.
On social media there are images of Iraq’s cities in revolt, and videos have gone viral across the Iraqi diaspora in London. One shows government troops looting shops in Baghdad, while dismayed citizens look on, hopelessly, and shout “Thieves!” after them. Another shows a scene from the town of Karbala, which lies to the south west of Baghdad. Here, in one of the holiest sites of Shi’ite Islam, men blockade the Iranian embassy, declaring “We have just one request: put the Iranian flag down” before chanting: “Iran out, out. The city of Karbala will stay free."
The anger directed at Iran has only intensified since, on 18th November, the New York Times in cooperation with The Intercept, an investigative journalism company, published 700 pages worth of leaked reports from the Iranian government. These provided details of the intelligence operations undertaken by Iran's intelligence agencies in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party in 2003. The documents, which are being called “The Iran Cables”, demonstrate the power of Iranian influence in the highest levels of government in Iraq. They reveal the extent to which the Iranian government has gone to maintain a pliable, Shia-led state in Baghdad, frequently outwitting US administrations and intelligence services in the process.
There has been a belated response from the US to the crisis. On 10th November, the White House issued a press release, which said that the US government “is seriously concerned by the continued attacks against protestors, civic activists, and the media, as well as restrictions on Internet access, in Iraq.” The White House called “on the Iraqi government to halt the violence” and for President Salih to fulfil promises to pass electoral reform and hold early elections.
Yet this resolution is unlikely to have any effect whatsoever upon the situation on the ground. The protestors in Baghdad have insisted that elections will not provide a solution to the country’s problems. Indeed, one Iraqi, Thawrah al-Ezzawi, a 49-year old public employee, told Al Jazeera from Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which has turned into the focal point of Iraq’s protest movement, that: “If they agree to hold early elections, the same faces will return…reshuffled”. Instead, he believes, “The system needs to change completely, and the people in power need to be held accountable”.
Beyond the US’s futile calls for early elections, the lack of response, or even awareness, from most Western countries concerning what is going on in Iraq testifies to some deeper dynamics at play. It is a consequence both of the seemingly interminable crisis of the Middle East and a “closing of the Western mind”. The general ignorance about the events currently taking place in Iraq illustrates the ways in which western countries have turned inwards upon themselves. It is not just that there are practical problems of translation at play in reporting upon the events in Iraq – there is, less and less, an ability to understand and empathise with what is taking place outside of a generalised, vague picture of what seems to be a permanent “Middle Eastern crisis”.
The fact of the matter is that events such as these are now so common in the Middle East that the situation has, rather perversely, become normalised. It becomes possible to compartmentalise shocking acts of violence by a state, supposedly created by and allied with the US, as something regular. Human rights violations are a new normal. In a sense, they cease to become news. The virtual silence in the West plays into a crisis of moral leadership. It is also an expression of the doubts unleashed after two jading and morale sapping interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One person who captures the tragedies of what has happened in Iraq well is Emma Sky, now Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at the University of Yale, who served as the Governate Coordinator of the Kirkuk region under the Coalition Provisional Authority from 2003-2004. She speaks of the failings and missed opportunities of the American- and British-led intervention without any illusions. In her memoir of her experience advising key US generals in the country in 2003-04 and 2007-10, The Unravelling, Sky writes damningly, quoting one Iraqi as saying: “The Coalition promised regime change but instead brought about state collapse.”
The reverberations of the state collapse experienced in Iraq over a decade ago are continuing to be felt in the power struggle between the US and Iran for influence in the crumbling kleptocracy of Baghdad. As with any revolution in the state, the normal scripts and rules were torn asunder, and ever since the people and politicians of Iraq have been trying to re-write them. The latest protests and the brutal government crackdown suggest very much that the new script will not be a utopia, but a civil tragedy.