15 Jan 2014

What Chairman Mao can teach us about Iraq

Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki hasn’t read Chairman Mao. On Guerilla Warfare, Mao’s famous 1937 manual, contains his most famous line about fighting rebels.

“A guerrilla can always sink back into the peaceful population which is the sea in which the guerrilla swims like a fish,” wrote Mao.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq are swimming in their old waters of Anbar province. Recently they retook the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, which they used to control back in 2003 and 2004. How did that happen?Blast in Iraq

Many would point the finger not just at the jihadis but at Mr Maliki.

“It is the Maliki threat that actually reinvigorated al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and gave the extremist group a toehold among some alienated and disenfranchised Iraqi Sunni,” writes Anthony Cordesman, a longtime commentator on the Middle East.

Since being elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2010, Maliki – pithily described in a recent article as “short on charm” – has made sure that power is held by his fellow Shi’ites, while Sunnis are pushed to the margins.

“Ever since the 2010 election, he has become steadily more repressive, manipulated Iraq’s security forces to serve his own interests, and created a growing Sunni resistance to his practice of using Shi’ite political support to gain his own advantage,” writes Mr Cordesman.

After battling AQI in Anbar in 2004, the Americans read Mao – or at least paid attention to what he had said. They realised they would get nowhere without the populace on their side, so they talked to the local sheikhs and started the Awakening Councils, groups of local Sunni men. Bit by bit they persuaded them to renounce al-Qaeda and support the Iraqi government. By the time the American troops were withdrawn in 2010, the US was paying US$300 a month to 85,000 local militiamen.

You can say they were bribing them to stay on side, or you could say they were creating much needed jobs. However you describe the policy, it worked.

So what did Nuri al Maliki do when the Americans left? He stopped paying the Sunni militiamen. Then he turned against his Sunni vice-president, and consolidated all power in his own hands.

AQI has since morphed into Al Qaeda in Iraq and Sham, and has been fighting primarily in Syria. They may not have been defeated but they were forced to find new battlegrounds. Anbar saw peace at least for a while. But now the Sunnis of Fallujah and Ramadi don’t regard Prime Minister al Maliki’s government necessarily as better than the jihadis. They have no jobs, and no political influence. Unsurprisingly, they put up little resistence when the men from al-Qaeda marched back into town earlier this month.

Today, 62 Iraqis were killed by carbombs, suicide attacks and armed assaults. The death toll for 2014 is climbing towards 800 and January isn’t over yet. The war in Syria is spreading south and reigniting sectarian feuds in Iraq.

“The battle will be long and it will continue,” said Mr Maliki today. On that, if nothing else, I suspect he’s right.

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