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Iraqi Shi'ites in Najaf Pledge to Fight Against ISIS, the Sunni Militant

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Iraqi Shi'ites in Najaf Pledge to Fight Against ISIS, the Sunni Militant WORLD Holy war, holy warriors Iraqi Shi‘ites in Najaf pledge to fight against ISIS, the Sunni militant group that has swept through northern Iraq IRAQ’SPhotograph by Haidar Hamdani ETERNAL WAR The sudden military victories of a Sunni militant group threaten maelstrom in the Middle East IRAQ’S ETERNAL WAR BY MICHAEL CROWLEY WORLD | IRAQ s the brutal fighters of the ancient hatreds are grinding the country to Islamic State of Iraq and Greater bits. Washington has reacted with shock— ANCIENT HATRED: Sunnis vs. Shi‘ites Syria (ISIS) rampaged through no one saw it coming—and the usual fin- northern Iraq in mid-June, a ger pointing, but today’s Washington is a Initial split spokesman for the group issued place where history is measured in hourly In the year 632 Muslims disagreed over a statement taunting its shaken news cycles and 140-character riffs. What’s who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad, enemies. Ridiculing Iraq’s Prime Minister happening in Iraq is the work of centuries, who had died that year. One group believed A that leadership should stay within the family Nouri al-Maliki as an “underwear mer- the latest chapter in the story of a religious of the Prophet and go to his son-in-law Ali. chant,” he warned that his fighters, who schism between Sunni and Shi‘ite that was They became the Shiat Ali (followers of Ali), or follow a radical strain of Sunni Islam, already old news a thousand years ago. Shi‘ites. The other group, the Sunnis, would take revenge against al-Maliki’s re- The Sunni radicals’ dream of establish- believed the Muslim community should determine the new leadership by consensus. gime, which is dominated by Shi‘ites. But ing an Islamic caliphate—modeled on the Ali eventually became the fourth caliph, or this vengeance would not come through first reign of the Prophet Mohammed in leader. Upon his assassination in 661, war the capture of Baghdad, the spokesman the 7th century—has no place for Shi‘ites. broke out between the two groups. vowed. It would come through the subju- That’s why Iraq’s leading Shi‘ite cleric re- gation of Najaf and Karbala, cities that are sponded to ISIS’s advance by summoning home to some of the most sacred Shi‘ite men of his faith to battle. So begins another Struggle for dominance shrines. The Sunni fighters of ISIS would Iraqi civil war, this one wretchedly entan- Around 1500 Safavid established the area cheerfully kill and die, if necessary, to gled with the sectarian conflict that has of modern-day Iran as Shi‘ite. Shi‘ites gradually united the Persian Empire and erase their blasphemous existence. already claimed more than 160,000 lives distinguished it from the Ottoman Empire What army would rather raze a few in Syria. Poised to join the fighting is Iran, (based in modern-day Turkey) to the west, shrines than seize a capital city? The answer whose nearly eight-year war with Iraq in which was Sunni. Today the majority of the says a lot about the disaster now unfolding the 1980s cost more than a million lives. world’s Muslims are Sunni, but Sunnis have long been a minority in Iraq. Nonetheless, in Iraq and rippling throughout the Middle To Americans weary of the Middle East, this Sunni minority controlled Iraqi politics in East. The rapid march by ISIS from Syria the urge is strong to close our eyes and, as the decades following World War I and under into Iraq is only partly about the troubled Sarah Palin once put it so coarsely, “let Al- Saddam Hussein. land where the U.S. lost almost 4,500 lives lah sort it out.” President Obama has kept and spent nearly $1 trillion in increasingly a wary distance from Syria’s civil war and vain hopes of establishing a stable, friendly the turmoil of postwar Iraq. But now that Modern-day rift democracy. ISIS is but one front in a holy war the two have become one rapidly metasta- In 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq and that stretches from Pakistan across the Mid- sizing cancer, that may no longer be pos- overthrew Saddam, allowing a Shi‘ite-led government to come to power. But sectarian dle East and into northern Africa. A few days sible. As long as the global economy still divides continued to trouble the country, before ISIS captured the northern Iraqi city runs on Middle Eastern oil, Sunni radicals almost leading to civil war in 2006–07. A of Mosul, Pakistani militants driven by sim- plot terrorist attacks against the West and surge of U.S. troops brought what now seems ilar Sunni radicalism killed 36 in an assault Iran’s leaders pursue nuclear technology, to have been a temporary peace. on their country’s busiest airport. Holy war the U.S. cannot turn its back. inspires the al-Shabab radicals who took “There is always the danger of passing credit for massacring at least 48 Kenyans in the buck,” says Vali Nasr, a former Obama The Westerners who have sought to a coastal town on June 15 and explains why State Department official and an expert control the Middle East for more than a suspected al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen rid- on Islam. “Not to say the region doesn’t century have always struggled to under- dled a bus full of military-hospital staff the have problems or bad leadership. It does. stand the religion that defines the region. same day. It’s the reason Boko Haram has But these things won’t go away. They are But how could the secular West hope to kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls going to bite us at some point.” What Leon understand cultures in which religion is and why Taliban fighters sliced off the ink- Trotsky supposedly said about war is also government, scripture is law and the past stained fingers of elderly voters who had cast true of this war-torn region: Americans defines the future? Islam has been divided ballots in Afghanistan’s June 14 presiden- may not be interested in the Middle East. between Sunni and Shi‘ite since the death tial election. Osama bin Laden is dead, but But the Middle East is interested in us. of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 and a his fundamentalist ideology—and its cold bitter dispute that followed over who logic of murder in God’s name—arguably should lead Islam. (Sunnis called for an has broader reach than ever. ANCIENT ENMITY elected caliph. Shi‘ites followed Muham- For now, the ISIS front is the most danger- as he helped draw the post–world mad’s descendants.) Over the centuries, the ous. The chilling prospect of holy warriors War I map of the Middle East, Winston two sects have developed distinct cultural, IMAGESAFP/GETTY PREVIOUSPAGES: with dueling nuclear capabilities—Sunnis Churchill asked an aide about the “reli- geographic and political identities that go in Islamabad and Shi‘ites in Tehran— gious character” of an Arab tribal leader well beyond the theological origins of that remains a worst-case scenario, but the he intended to place in charge of Britain’s schism. Today, Sunnis make up about breakup of Iraq as a nation-state appears to client state in Iraq. “Is he a Sunni with 90% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. But be all but an accomplished fact. Two and a Shaih sympathies or a Shaih with Sunni Shi‘ites have disproportionate power, with half years after the U.S. withdrew its last sympathies?” Churchill wrote, in now an- their control of Iran and their concentra- combat forces and more than a decade since tiquated spelling. “I always get mixed up tion around oil-rich areas. the beginning of America’s war in Iraq, between these two.” The seat of Shi‘ite power is Iran, whose 30 BATTLE LINES ISIS is sweeping from Syria into Iraq MILITANT DREAMS ISIS wants to build a cross-border caliphate Black Sea Black Sea TURKEY TURKEY IRAN IRAN Mosul Mosul Aleppo Aleppo Raqqa Kirkuk Raqqa Kirkuk Tikrit SYRIA SYRIA Tikrit Baghdad IRAQ IRAQ JORDAN JORDAN Baghdad SAUDI ARABIA SAUDI ARABIA KUWAIT KUWAIT AREAS OF ISIS PRESENCE KURDISH SUNNI SHI‘ITE ISIS-ENVISIONED BOUNDARIES FOR A NEW STATE 1979 Islamic revolution cracked open the eagerly supported the training and arming of al-Qaeda documents in which its op- bottle in which the region’s sectarian ten- of young jihadists—among them a rich eratives say things along the lines of ‘the sions had been sealed for many years—first young Saudi named Osama bin Laden—to Americans are evil, the secular tyrants are by the nearly 500-year rule of the Ottoman fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. That vic- evil, the Israelis are evil—and the Shi‘ites Empire and then by Western colonizers. tory was short-lived as bin Laden and other are worse than all of them,’” says Daniel Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini’s over- Sunni warriors, lit by the conviction that Benjamin, the former counterterrorism throw of the pro-American Shah of Iran Allah had empowered them, founded al- coordinator at the State Department who fired the ambitions of jihadists elsewhere Qaeda and declared the goal of establishing is now at Dartmouth College. Some Saudi and instituted the region’s first modern a new caliphate. Targeting the U.S. and oth- textbooks depict Shi‘ism as more devi- theocratic regime. The ensuing American er Western powers, which bin Laden called ant than Christianity or even Judaism. A hostage crisis established Iran’s new leader- “the far enemy,” was just a step toward the common bit of folklore among Lebanese ship as a mortal enemy of the West.
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