How Shiites Won the Battle Against Islamic State

Mohammed M.A. Ahmed

How Shiites Won the Battle
Against Islamic State

Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ahmed, Mohammed M.A., author.

Title: How Shiites won the battle against Islamic State: Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq / Mohammed M.A. Ahmed.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021520 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5434-8 (hardback: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5794-3 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5795-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5796-7 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: IS (Organization) | Shiites—Political activity—Iraq.

Sunnites—Iraq. | Kurds—Iraq.

Iraq—Politics and government—2003–.

Classification: LCC DS70.8.S55 A38 2018 | DDC 956.7044/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021520

DOI 10.3726/b14217

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the author

Mohammed M.A. Ahmed is the president and founder of the Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that sponsors conferences and undertakes scholarly studies concerning Kurdish culture, history, and politics in the Middle East. Ahmed worked for the United Nations for 24 years in different capacities in developing countries and at the headquarters in New York City. As a UN expert, he provided advisory services to member states on economic and social development issues and represented the organization at numerous regional and international conferences. Ahmed is the author of America Unravels Iraq: Kurds, Shiites, and Sunni Arabs Compete for Supremacy and Iraqi Kurds and Nation-Building and is the coeditor of The Evolution of Kurdish Nationalism, The Kurdish Question and International Law, Kurdish Exodus: From Internal Displacement to Diaspora, The Kurdish Question and the 2003 Iraq War, and The Kurdish Spring: Geopolitical Changes and the Kurds.

About the book

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq inadvertently changed the balance of power in favor of the Shiite community in Iraq and beyond. How Shiites Won the Battle Against Islamic State: Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq sheds light on how the Shiite-dominated government’s sectarian policies deepened the divide between Iraq’s major communities (Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds) and led the country on the path of unending sectarian violence. This book explains how the government’s failure to address Sunni Arab grievances led to the emergence of the radical Islamic State and convinced the Kurds that they could not coexist with Iraqi Arabs, who had been at each other’s throats since 2003. This book notes that the emergence of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad was a historical event that led Iran to achieve its longstanding dream of extending its influence from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. How Shiites Won the Battle Against Islamic State places a special focus on how Shiite politicians’ slick diplomacy and media campaigns diverted attention from its sectarian policies in 2014 by labeling the Sunni Arabs as terrorists and Kurdish leaders as corrupt separatists and troublemakers. This book also uncovers how the Iraqi government was able to garner Western military and political support to defeat ISIS and derail the Kurdish statehood movement.

Advance Praise for

How Shiites Won the Battle Against Islamic State

“This is the third sequel to Mohammed M.A. Ahmed’s trilogy dealing with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and its consequences. He presents a masterful study of the disastrous war for the peoples—Arab Sunnis and Shi’a and Kurds—as well as for the international geopolitical and geo-economical order. As he indicated in his first book, Iraq continues to unravel with great historical consequences. The fifteen years of war have contributed to a reversal of the accepted history of Iraq and much of the Middle East. For only the second time since 1517, when the Safavid Shi’a in Iran came to power, has a state dominated by Shi’a been able to come to power in the Middle East. Ahmed’s profound knowledge of Iraq’s history adumbrated early on the possibility that Shi’a might be able to come to power in Iraq. Ahmed details the history-making events that made this possible. Scholars, analysts, diplomats, intelligence agencies, and statesmen will want to read this insightful book. Ahmed’s book makes a brilliant addition to the growing historiography of the war.”

—Robert Olson, Professor Emeritus of Middle East History and olitics at the University of Kentucky

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Michael M. Gunter

List of Abbreviations

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Prelude to the Rise of Islamic State

Chapter Three: Al-Maliki Seeks U.S. Support

Chapter Four: Insurgents Declare Islamic State in Fallujah and Ramadi

Chapter Five: Iraqi Army Flee ISIS Attack

Chapter Six: Al-Maliki Takes Down the Kurds With Him

Chapter Seven: U.S. Expresses Concern Over Fall of Baghdad

Chapter Eight: U.S. Eager to Resuscitate Iraqi Army

Chapter Nine: Ramadi Offensive

Chapter Ten: Fallujah Operation and Its Humanitarian Fallout

Chapter Eleven: The Battle for Mosul

Chapter Twelve: Can Shiite Coalition Put Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again

Index←ix | x→ ←x | xi→ ←xi | xii→

Acknowledgements

My sincere appreciation goes to my wife and lifetime partner, Shirley Ann Ahmed, for critically proofreading my manuscript and parts of it more than once, correcting typing errors and raising substantive questions about the contents of the manuscript. Living with me in Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Bahrain, while I was working for the United Nations, gave my wife the firsthand knowledge about Middle Eastern political intrigues and complexity. While I was lecturing and doing research at the University of Baghdad in the 1960s, my wife was teaching at the American Community School in Baghdad. Her knowledge and experience of the Middle Eastern culture and politics have enabled her to read the manuscript with a critical eye.

My special thanks are due to my close friend and longtime work partner, Dr. Michael M. Gunter, Professor of political Science at the Tennessee Technological University, for critically proofreading my manuscript and for making several substantive suggestions to tighten and polish the text. Professor Gunter and I have jointly organized numerous conferences and panels on Kurdish topics and published their outcomes as co-editors. Our frequent telephone conversations about the evolving political situation in the Middle East have helped us to select relevant themes for organizing panels on the Kurds at the Middle East Studies Association annual conferences. I have benefited immensely from reading Professor Gunter’s numerous scholarly prepared articles and books.

I would also like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the periodic hour-long telephone calls between Professor Robert Olson and me, during which we have grilled each other about the impact of intra and inter-state Middle East politics on regional stability and development. The frequent telephone calls between Professor Olson and myself in recent years have broadened my perspective of the impact of past events on current political issues in the Middle East. Dr. Olson is professor of Middle East History at the University of Kentucky.

My special thanks go to Katharine Strickland, Maps Librarian at the University of Texas in Austin, who provided me with a number of maps of Iraq for inclusion in my book and for helping me to contact other sources concerning maps for land under the Kurdistan Regional Government administration in northern Iraq. I am most grateful to the Ahmed Foundation For Kurdish Studies for giving me the opportunity to shed a new light on the continued struggle for power between Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs, some 100 years after Britain glued together the predominantly Shiite province of Basra in the south, the predominantly Sunni province of Baghdad in the center, and the predominantly Kurdish province of Mosul in the north to create the new state of Iraq following WWI. Instability in Iraq is expected to continue until the three communities reach consensus about a new formula for governance, under which they can live harmoniously. Otherwise, the present Iraq is doomed to splinter at some point in time either into two or three political entities.←xii | xiii→ ←xiii | xiv→

Foreword

Michael M. Gunter

Dr. Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and I have worked together on the Kurdish question and related matters for almost two decades, uniquely and successfully blending his Kurdish and my American heritage and scholarship.¹ Dr. Ahmed even let me make suggestions to the two recent books he wrote and published by himself.² The noted book critic Christopher de Bellaigue mentioned Dr. Ahmed’s later book favorably in the prestigious New York Review of Books.³ Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I can recommend Dr. Ahmed’s latest scholarly endeavor on how the battle against the terrorism of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) helped the Iraqi Shiites tighten their grip on power in Iraq, while marginalizing the Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis.

Of course, Iraq was fragmenting before the emergence of ISIS. However, once the jihadist terrorist group appeared, the Shiites used the battle against it as a vehicle to gain the support of the military, especially when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared that he was fighting terrorism on behalf of the West, while refugees were inundating their countries. Thus the Shiites would not have been able to gain the recognition and the power they are enjoying now without the emergence of ISIS. In effect, ISIS was manna from heaven for the Shiites. Indeed some Sunni Arabs even claimed that ISIS was al-Maliki’s creation to tighten his grip on power.

Dr. Ahmed holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Agricultural Economics from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Before taking on his present labors of scholarly publications, Dr. Ahmed was an economics professor at the University of Baghdad during the 1960s where he lectured and conducted research on government policies with direct bearing on economic and social conditions of the rural people. He joined the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in 1969 and served as resident expert in Jordan, Syria, Bahrain and Sri Lanka until 1975. This position helped him to assist UN member states to prepare and implement economic and social development programs.

In 1975, Dr. Ahmed joined the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) in Beirut as a senior Social Affairs Officer, providing advisory services to member states. He moved to the UN Department of Technical Cooperation for Development in New York in 1980 and functioned in different capacities until he retired at the end of 1993. The final post he held at the UN was Chief of the Policy and Development Planning Branch of the Department of Development Support Services, which provided technical and advisory services to member states on social and economic development issues. He represented the UN in numerous regional and international conferences, presenting research papers dealing with food security, desertification, environmental protection, migration, people’s participation, refugees, minority rights, poverty alleviation, health care, education and technology transfer.

Retirement was actually the genesis of yet another career as he established the Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, a non-profit and non-partisan organization, which undertakes scholarly studies pertaining to Kurdish history, culture and politics in the Middle East. As the President of this NGO, Dr. Ahmed has organized numerous high-level conferences attended by internationally known scholars dealing with various aspects of the Kurdish issue and published their results as detailed above.

Dr. Ahmed’s present study represents a unique insight into important matters that will add a valuable contribution to our understanding of the role ISIS has played in helping reorient Iraqi and even Middle Eastern politics. In addition, his analysis also will give us lessons on how successfully to combat and prevent future jihadists’/ terrorists’ threats. As such this present work←xiv | xv→ offers much to scholars, government practitioners, and members of the lay public. I highly recommend it.

1. See for example, Mohammed M. A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter, eds., The Kurdish Question and the 2003 Iraqi War (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2005); Mohammed M. A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter, eds., The Evolution of Kurdish Nationalism (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers Inc., 2007); and Mohammed M. A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter, eds., The Kurdish Spring: Geopolitical Changes and the Kurds (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers Inc., 2013). In addition, see Mohammed M. A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter, eds., The Kurdish Question and International Law: An Analysis of the Legal Rights of the Kurdish People (Oakton, VA: Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, 2000); and Mohammed M. A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter, eds., Kurdish Exodus: From Displacement to Diaspora (Sharon, MA: Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, 2001).

2. Mohammed M. A. Ahmed (Hama Jamal), America Unravels Iraq: Kurds, Shiites and Sunni Arabs Compete for Supremacy (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2010).

3. Christopher de Debellaigue, “The Resurgence of the Kurds,” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013.←xv | xvi→ ←xvi | xvii→