Sadrists still occupying part of Baghdad’s Green zone last month
said they’re ready for “clashes” in order to achieve their “Muharram
Revolution” demands. [photo credit: @nafisehkBBC]
Sadr’s attempted Tripartite Alliance government with a Sunni Arab
alignment and the leading Kurdish faction, reflected a perceptible
weakening of Iranian influence in Iraq, even though former Prime
Minister Nouri Al-Maliki allegedly privately accused Iran of having
supported Sadr’s past ambitions. The Sadrists believe Iran (and its
‘High Commissioner’, the IRGC Qods Force chief Esmail Qani) has
encouraged Maliki to propose an anti-Sadrist PM. This rhetorical
spinning aside, the reassertion of the ‘national’ government option by
Maliki and his Shia allies reflects the fact that this Shia political
plurality were never going to surrender power easily, and that they knew
they could count on discreet Iranian backing, even if Tehran is not the
player in Iraq it was under the assassinated Qassim Suleimani. In this
context a continued Mustafa Kadhemi premiership could be the preference
of the Iraqi Shia political plurality, the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, and
Iran. Kadhemi, after all, has no political base, enjoys good relations
with the ‘enemy’ (the US), and is unable to seriously restructure the
Hashed Al-Sha’abi, the umbrella organisation for dozens of mostly Shia
militias. The leading Hashed militias may not be Iranian tools, but they
are not an Iraqi nationalist enemy of Iran either.
As long as the rhetoric of militia reconstruction does little to
alter the Hashed’s shadow role as the armed wing of leading Shia
political forces, whether Maliki’s Da’wa, Hadi Al-Amri’s Badr, Qais
Khazali’s Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, and others of an even more overt wilaya hue,
then Iran will be content and Iraqi sovereignty will remain an
oxymoron. The US will seek to persuade whomever the nominal Iraqi
‘Commander-in-Chief’ is, that loosening the Iranian lines of political
and militia influence is an important part of a wider regional
realignment in which pre-eminent Sunni Arab-led states, Saudi Arabia,
the UAE and Egypt (together with Jordan), are hoping to include Iraq.
Iraq will probably be a member of any Arab club that is going, as long
as Israel isn’t visibly present. Iraq’s foreign minister will sit in any
fora that may encourage Baghdad’s ‘normalisation’ with Iraq’s former
Arab brethren. That foreign minister is and will be a cypher for the
wider internal and regional Iraqi status quo in which Baghdad isn’t
master of its own house.
In the north, Baghdad will contest with Irbil for Kirkuk and the
control of oil (court decisions do not affect practise, it seems).
However, the Baghdad Government will let other Iraqis fight Turkey as
the latter constrains ‘foreign’ Kurds in Iraq and makes a nonsense of
either Iraqi or would-be (Iraqi) Kurdish sovereignty. As Turkey bombs
parts of the Iraqi north, so too does Iran assault Iraqi territory
indirectly, or in recent months even directly. Unusually, Iran admitted
in March 2022 to bombing what it said was a ‘Zionist’ (Israeli) target
in the KRG capital Irbil. However, this was equally likely to have been
an Iranian-attempted but unsuccessful coercion of the KDP over its
(since failed) participation in a three-way Sadrist-led majority
government, and resentment at the presence of Iranian Kurdish militia.
The US’ reconfigured military role inside Iraq remains contested and
controversial, even though many Iraqi factions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd)
do not wish the US’ infringement of Iraqi sovereignty to end just yet.
Outside of the machinations of formal executive power, sub-state
identities, and to extent para-state identities, look set to run counter
to state coherence and strength. A state that does not function
properly always enables default space for identities and social
formations for popular support and even some political weight. This
remains the case among Sunni Arabs even as ‘tribe’ is neither the
state-incorporated construct nor the intermediate force it once was in
Iraq. Among the Shia, tribe is likewise a platform for social and
political support and, for Hashed Al-Sha’abi militia especially,
influence.
Iraq’s regional and international ‘allies’ continue to make a
nonsense of Iraqi statehood, often assisted by Iraqi clients pursuing
sub-state interests concomitant with those of their external sponsors. A
truly national government, whose component parts are not calculating
their political decisions based on sub and/or para-state interests,
remains illusive in Iraq, if it ever existed. Iraqi state functionality
does exist, but in sovereign security or economic terms it is often by
accident rather than design.
Sovereign authority isn’t lent to the Iraqi state by Iraqi citizens
equally capable of withdrawing this consent. Sovereignty in Iraq is a
painfully negotiated compromise between powerful armed political groups
asserting state writ when that fits with their own sectional interests,
and equally withdrawing approval for state action if that does not
accord with factional considerations. The literal security of the state
and thus of the citizenry is determined or directly undermined by
competing state, sub-state, para-state and even anti-state actors. Iraqi
state sovereignty is an awkward by-product of armed groups, not the
supposed outcome of popular sovereign will.