BAGHDAD: The militants dismantling Iraq’s borders and threatening regional war are far from united — theirs is a marriage of convenience between ultra-hardline religious zealots and more pragmatic Sunni armed groups.
For now, they share a common enemy in Shia Islamist Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
But each anticipates they will square off someday over the future shape of Iraq’s Sunni territories.
The question looms over who will triumph: the al Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which aims to carve out a modern-day Caliphate, or myriad Iraqi armed factions, who fight based on a nexus of tribal, family, military and religious ties and nostalgia for the past before the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Many experts and Western officials believe ISIS, due to its internal cohesion, and access to high-powered weapons and stolen cash, will overpower its Sunni rivals.
They point to the lessons of Syria’s three-year-old civil war, where a unified ISIS leadership steam-rolled other groups and entrenched itself as the force to be reckoned with in western Syria. They warn that even the Sunni revolt against al Qaeda last decade in Iraq would not have succeeded without the decisive punch of American firepower.
Cracks are already showing in the loose alliance of ISIS and fellow Sunni forces, suggesting the natural frictions that exist between the jihadists and other factions will inevitably grow.
In the Iraqi town of Hawija, ISIS and Saddam loyalists from Baath party, fought turf battles from Friday to Sunday when ISIS demanded their rival pledge loyalty to them, according to locals. At least 15 people died before the clashes ended in stalemate.
FRICTION MAY GROW
Such confrontations could become the new reality in rebel held zone if there is no swift political resolution to the crisis that began two weeks ago when ISIS stormed Mosul, seizing it in hours and then dashed across northern Iraq grabbing large swathes of land.
The charge, which saw the army abandon positions en masse, has defined the dynamics between ISIS and the other insurgents.
According to a high-level security officials, ISIS has about 2,300 fighters, including foreigners, who have led the speedy assault from Mosul through other northern towns, including Hawija, west of oil-rich Kirkuk; Baiji, home of Iraq’s biggest refinery; and Saddam Hussein’s birthplace Tikrit.
The official told Reuters that as ISIS has raced on from Mosul, the north’s biggest city which they dominate, other Iraqi Sunni groups have seized much of the newly-gained rural territory because ISIS is short on manpower.
The different groups appear to be following ISIS’s lead in the bigger communities it has captured like Tikrit and Baiji.
But as the new order settles in Iraq’s Sunni north, the high-level security officer predicted: “They will soon be fighting each other.”
Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security expert with good contacts in Gulf Arab governments, also expects friction to grow.
“How long can this honeymoon last?” he said. “ISIS is not acceptable among the people, either socially or politically.”
If the rebel alliance does fracture, battles could drag Sunni regions of Iraq into a state of permanent internecine war.
A Sunni politician sketched out the future.
“ISIL will take a stand in favor of (its) Islamic law, and the people of the region will refuse because they will want to protect their rights,” said Dr. Muhannad Hussam, a politician with the nationalist Arabiya list.
“NO ONE WILL WIN”
“I am afraid for the Sunni areas. They will be burned. No one will win.”
He said that other insurgent groups, even if they could not defeat ISIS, would eventually adopt guerrilla tactics and still be able to hurt ISIS, regardless of the jihadists’ superior arms. “They can fight as gangs, not as a military,” he said.
“They are tied to the land and ISIS is not. ISIS can’t fight an enemy from all sides.”
British Defence Minister Philip Hammond, touring Gulf Arab states to discuss Iraq, told reporters in Qatar on Wednesday ISIS could lose control of Sunni areas if local people could be persuaded to withdraw the tacit support they were giving it.
Some Gulf Arab countries had been sending messages to moderate Sunni leaders in Iraq about a political solution, he said without elaborating.
For now, the front rests on two strong pillars: the groups’ common membership of the Sunni minority, and a conviction that Sunnis have been marginalized and persecuted by Maliki. Both factors have helped ISIS win the cooperation if not the hearts of war-weary Sunni communities. Many of ISIS’s current partners initially collaborated with its parent organization al Qaeda before revolting between 2006 and 2008, disgusted by its ultra-hardline agenda.
Then, when they rebelled against al Qaeda they were bolstered by U.S. firepower, winning promises of reconciliation with Maliki led government. But Maliki failed to deliver on those pledges and security forces continued to carry out mass arrests in the face of militant threats.
As violence has exploded in the last two years, ISIS has seized on such communal grievances.
LOOTING, SMUGGLING
ISIS has multiple internal strengths — ruthlessness, self-funded wealth estimated in the tens of millions of dollars from sophisticated extortion rackets, kidnap ransoms, smuggling of oil and other goods, diplomats and counter-terrorism experts say, and eye-catching social media skills.
It and other groups have looted and dismantled captured Syrian factories and sold off the equipment, the diplomats said.
It also has open lines of communication to support bases in neighboring Syria, where it is a powerful force in that country’s civil war. Its bastion in the town of Raqqa gives it proximity to Turkey — a conduit for foreign recruits — as well as access to Syrian oil reserves, which it sells. They have tapped similar markets in Iraq.
Its achievement in dismantling much of the border drawn by European colonialists nearly a century ago is a source of prestige in the trans-national community of Islamist sympathizers that provides a steady flow of foreign recruits.
And yet, self sufficient though it may be in material terms, in Iraq in recent months it has consciously teamed with other Iraqi factions. It has drawn strength by partnering with them, or by choosing not to hunt them down over past grudges and mainly resisted the urge to eliminate alternative voices. –Reuters
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