If disarmed enough, the Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites may just revolt and take control of the oil fields before US-Brits get there. Then what? War will be against the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites? The Iranian Shi'ites are ready!
We'll see what kind of "freedom" and "democracy" will be afforded to these tribes. The most likely theme will be "Let them eat dirt".
Quagmire in northern Iraq deepens
By Ian Urbina
In northern Iraq, just 18 kilometers from the border with Iran, there is a new military camp under construction, but it is neither Kurds, Turks, nor US troops who are digging in. So far, 200 soldiers from the Badr Brigade have arrived, and these Iranian-backed Shi'ite forces have pitched enough tents for five times their present number. These men are only the most recent variable added to an already over-complicated scene.
Some of the new arrivals say that they are there to help overthrow Saddam Hussein. Others among their ranks tell the press that they intend to support the Kurds in resisting the Turks if the northern neighbor attempts to cross the border. Both may be true. But these Shi'ite soldiers are certainly also there to establish a forceful presence in case of a power vacuum that could ensue during and after the war. Ostensibly, they would act on behalf of the 60 percent of Iraq's population that is Shi'ite, rather than Sunni.
Whether the Brigade is better characterized as a group of Iranian proxies than as a group of Iraqi opposition fighters is not altogether clear. Most of their military equipment is Iranian-issued. They speak Farsi during exercises and they drive the beige Nissan Patrols used by the Iranian military. Yet many of the men are Iraqi Shi'ites who fled to Iran during the 1990s to escape Saddam's repression.
The Badr Brigade is also the military arm of an organization called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which happens to have been headquartered in Tehran for the past 20 years.
At the helm of the Supreme Council is one man who some predict could be politically pivotal in the postwar scene. Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim is not an external implant. His family name carries considerable recognition inside southern Iraq. His father is the former grand ayatollah of Iraq's Shi'ites who was famous for issuing a fatwah against Saddam's Ba'ath Party. Five of Hakim's brothers, and 50 of his other relatives, have been killed by the Iraqi regime. Hakim endured prison and torture before he escaped the country. All of this certainly helps his standing inside Iraq.
But Hakim fled in 1980 and some doubt that he still has sufficient support inside the country to be a player. Many secular Iraqi Shi'ites are also skeptical of the Supreme Council, fearing that it has ambitions of installing a theocratic model like that in Iran. Whatever their agenda, one thing is certain: the Shi'ites of the Supreme Council and the Badr Brigade represent the only opposition group other than the Kurds with armed backers on the ground inside Iraq. For that reason alone they can hardly be dismissed.
The Supreme Council and the Badr Brigade will also tap into a deep vein of frustration among Iraqi Shi'ites who have suffered years of brutal repression. The Sunnis of the country have always held the upper hand, at least as far back as the Ottomans and the British thereafter, both of whom chose to exert their power through the minority Sunni. Saddam's Ba'ath Party is also Sunni-based, and he has hardly treated the Shi'ites much better than his predecessors, even after many Iraqi Shi'ites fought alongside Iraqi Sunnis in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The Shi'ites are also distrustful of the United States after the 1991 betrayal in which Washington encouraged them to rebel against Saddam, but refused to provide air support when Baghdad's royal guards began rolling over the rebel forces. As part of the ceasefire arrangements, General Norman Schwarzkopf, who headed the first Gulf War, acceded to the Iraqi military's request that their pilots be allowed to operate helicopters. The Iraqi military later used these helicopters to attack and kill Shi'ites.
Those were bloody days for the Shi'ites. When Saddam's tanks rolled into Shi'ite territories they were painted with the slogan "From today, there will be no Shi'ites left in Iraq." Eventually, with the northern (Kurdish area) and southern (Shi'ite area) no-fly zones established, Saddam pulled his men back from the north. But he continued on a campaign of terror in the south, causing the disappearance of more than 100 Shiite clerics in a matter of months.
Politically, this is not a new arrival for the Supreme Council within the Iraqi opposition scene. Since the beginning, the group has been a fixture within one of the main Iraqi opposition umbrella organizations, the Iraqi National Congress. The Supreme Council holds about one-third of the 65 seats on an opposition steering committee that is expected to guide the transition, and six seats on the leadership committee.
For its part, the administration of US President George W Bush is none too thrilled with the presence of the Badr Brigade in northern Iraq. When asked about the group, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher remarked this week, "We're against any Iranian presence in northern Iraq or any group that reflects Iranian presence in northern Iraq."
But if the Turkey-Iraq-Iran-US tensions weren't complicated enough in relation to the Badr Brigade's presence in northern Iraq, there is also an internal Kurdish divide over the group. Many of the Kurds of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the northern Iraqi border with Iran, hold good relations with the Brigade. The other major Kurdish faction, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which is based more toward the northwestern corner, controlling the corridor to Turkey, sees the Brigade as a mortal foe.
In the past, these two rival Kurdish factions have battled each other. One reason for the difference of opinion concerning the Brigade is that in 1996, when the KDP invited Saddam's forces up into the north to slaughter the rival faction, it was Iran that provided refuge to the PUK. These actions, not to mention the loyalties and enmities they instill, are not quickly forgotten.
All this could seriously mire any US forces in what is already a dangerously deep quagmire, both during and after the war.
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