Iraq has been in the throes of a political crisis, with last week’s session opening with an all-out brawl. That isn’t a metaphor, it was an actual brawl, with fists and water bottles thrown. Influential cleric and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr informed the parliament that if they didn’t step down within 72 hours, he would trigger protests. This comes at a time when the northern half of the country is embroiled in ongoing violence caused by the death cult which calls itself the Islamic State.
As of today, the protesters have broken through into the green zone, and taken control of the Iraqi parliament building. Police and military forces stood by and made no attempt to stop the protesters. Jubilant protesters sat in the parliament chamber, chanting “The cowards ran away, the cowards ran away.
It’s not clear what will happen next.
Al-Sadr runs one of the larger Shia militias which has been fighting with IS. His militia has been engaged in ethnic warfare. The Mahdi Army, as it is called, has been accused of running death squads. So have the Sunni tribes in the north. The situation is a complete mess.
On sectarian lines, the protesters are Shia, while the Islamic State falls on the Sunni side of the ongoing sectarian conflict.
Iraq has been politically broken since George W. Bush’s De-Baathification laws turned Iraqi law into an sectarian war zone. The Ba’ath party was as all-consuming as any European fascist party. Anyone who wanted to have a middle class job was essentially required to be a member. The laws created by the Bush administration’s program have barred everyone who is a former Ba’ath party member from being employed in the public sector, which includes many state-owned industries, as well as holding political office. Those laws have been regularly used to keep Sunnis from running for office, turning the Iraqi parliament into an ethnic football.
This goes much, much further than the De-Nazification laws created in Germany at the end of the second world war. Under those laws, only those people who were suspected of committing war crimes were barred from public service.
The borders created by the British and French Empires with the Sykes-Picot agreement are coming apart. The agreement will turn 100 years on on May 16th.