The Shi’a problem:
After WW1, when British forces moved into the former Ottoman Empire’s provinces in
Mesopotamia, the Iraqi Shiites had obeyed the fatwa (Religious order) of their clerical
hierarchy to resist cooperation with the “crusaders.”
This decision further marginalized the Shia in the governance of their own country.
The Sunni cooperated with the British.
In Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites have not always been at war with each other.
It is quite common to hear Iraqis proudly describe their families as having members of both sects.
On a personal and communal level Sunnis and Shiites have long intermarried.
Between 1920 and the 1960s, Shia’s religious leaders were dormant: did not participate in state
institutions, and refrained from overt opposition.
Slide
During Saddam’s rule the Shia were ruthlessly assaulted.
Their cities were systematically neglected and starved of services.
The Ba’athists banned public celebration of Shia festivals such as Ashoura and murdered popular
religious leaders.
Every Shia clerical family of note in Iraq suffered under Saddam and has tales of torture and
murder to recount,
But religious opposition to Hussein’s power came mostly from the Shi’a.
Their most important organization,
Al-Dawah al Islamiyah (the Islamic Call),
was established In 1967 by Shia clergy and activists to oppose the Ba'ath regime's policies.
The Da’wa was a revolutionary organization dedicated to creating an Islamic state in Iraq.
Ibrahim al-Jafari, Iraq’s first elected prime minister, was a member of
Da’wa.
Nuri al-Maliki
It drew ideological inspiration from Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr
and Ayatollah Khomeini’s writing.
1970s
The Da’wa gained strength in the 1970s as it developed an organizational structure and
recruited from among the ulama and Shia youth.
The politicization of religion under the charismatic influence of leading cleric Muhammed
Baqir-al-Sadr,, was a serious threat to the secular Sunni Ba’ath regime.
The crackdown on al-Da’wa began in 1974.
In 1977 the Ba’athists purged the Shiite community in al-Najaf in and executed five leading
clerics, including Iraq's supreme religious authority.
It is said that Saddam’s henchman murdered the popular Shia cleric
Muhhamam Baqir al-Sadre in 1980 in particularly gruesome fashion (allegedly they forced him to
watch his sister’s rape and then drove nails into his forhead).
1980s
Al-Da’wa’s growing prominence worried Saddam, who suppressed it and pushed it
underground in 1980.
By that time a fundamental pillar of Ba’ath Party rule – the separation of religion from
politics – was beginning to crack.
The real threat to the regime came from the potential combination of radical Shi’a religious
leaders with the disposed masses of ordinary Shi’a.
He purged the Ba’th Party and senior military ranks of Shia and added a “carrot” to his policy by
spending more money in poor Shis neighborhoods, towns, and region of the country.
The key to soothing tensions between the Sunni center and the Shi’a majority was to spread
wealth and power more equitably.
In the meantime, al-Da’wa, now working underground, created al-Badr Brigade, which began a
guerilla battle against the Iraqi government.
In response, Saddam killed Sadr and expelled 40,000 Shi’a to Iran.
And yet the vast majority of Iraqi Shiites remained loyal to Iraq, fighting alongside their
Sunni compatriots against their Iranian co-religionists for the eight bloody years of the IranIraq War.
1990s
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, faced with a major Shi’a uprising in the south.
The uprising in the south, encouraged, then abandoned by the United States, was decisively
put down, with indiscriminate killing of upwards of 100,000 people.
The American "betrayal," and Hussein's unprecedented brutality, taught the Shi’a, and all Iraqis,
that challenging the Ba'ath regime was risky as long as Hussein retained any control.
Since then, the decade-long economic sanctions have led to the deaths of half a million mostly
poor and Shi’a Iraqis.
Saddam killed the grand ayatollah Muahhamd Sadeq Al_sadr and his two sons (Muqtada al Sadr’s
father and elder brothers) in 1999,
and several uncles and cousins and ten brothers of Adbul-Aziz al-Hakim, the current head of
SCIRI.
The Shi’a have fought back: A near-fatal attack on Hussein's son Udai was mounted in 1996.
Two years later, Saddam's second-in-command, Izzat Ibrahim, was nearly assassinated, and
large-scale violence erupted in Shi’a cities in 1999, following the killing of several Shi’a religious
leaders.
Tribal Structure
How many tribes are there in Iraq today?
It's not known exactly, in part because comprehensive anthropological research has not been
conducted in Iraq for decades.
there are certainly hundreds— and likely more than 1,000— tribal organizations now in Iraq.
There are about 20-30 large tribes or federations that have 100,000 or more descendents.
A caveat: Arab tribal society is traditionally ordered on multiple levels— by confederation, tribe,
clan, house, and extended family.
Deciphering which unit is being referred to by the word "tribe" from one situation to the next can be
difficult.
What binds a tribe together?
A mixture of
shared ancestry,
geography,
and a strict social code that demands allegiance between members.
Ethnic background and religion are less important factors— in fact, some tribes in Iraq have Sunni,
Shiite, and even Kurdish branches.
In some cases, tribal affiliation is a much older bond than religious affiliation.
For example, a number of tribes in southern Iraq adopted Shiite Islam only in the 19th century.
What was the role of tribes in the past?
The Ottomans tried to weaken tribal authorities (because this was where the opposition to their rule
was coming from):
By disrupting settlement patterns and
and replacing tribal sheiks with smaller cadres of favored leaders who became conduits for
patronage.
Opposition to the British administration was coming mostly from nationalist urban elites opposed to
foreign rule.
In an effort to counter defiant urban leaders, they empowered rural tribes on the periphery.
In Iraq, the British armed the tribes so that the sheiks could maintain order in the countryside and
balance the capabilities of the nominal local governments operating under League of Nations
mandates.
Thus, the tribal system that Ottoman rule sought to dismantle was revitalized by British
imperial policy.
The power of the nominal Iraqi government was systematically made ineffective.
In 1933, Iraq's King Faisal lamented, "In this kingdom, there are more than 100,000 rifles, whereas
the government has only 15,000."
The tribes lost some power over the subsequent decades as a result of:
1. increasing direct British involvement in activities such as law enforcement, land tenure, and
water distribution
2. urbanization: as Iraqis moved from the country to the city, their affiliations shifted from the tribe
to urban institutions -- principally the trade union and the mosque -- even as they held on to tribal
symbols.
Iraqi tribes continued to lose power under both the modernizing monarchy and the republican
regime.
The republican regime enacted and began to implement agrarian reform.
When the Baathists took power in 1968, they explicitly rejected "religious sectarianism, racism,
and tribalism ... the remnants of colonialism."
The tribes, in their minds, were inevitable rivals of a centralizing state.
Baathists split up large estates of the tribal sheiks and enforced land reform. Millions of Iraqis
moved into cities, taking jobs in industry as Iraq began to build a modern economy.
Their push for a unified Arab nationalism and the widespread migration from traditional tribal areas
(somewhat) eroded tribal ties.
But after taking control in a coup in 1979, Saddam leaned on his own Sunni tribal networks to staff:
his security services,
army leadership,
and bureaucracy.
At first he suppressed other tribal life.
He tried to rein in tribes by dispersing Baathist apparatchiks throughout the hinterland.
But he later came to rely on the tribal system as a whole to make up for the shortcomings of
the state as times became harder.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Saddam shifted his political program and openly supported the tribal
sheiks.
During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam used Shiite tribes to defend regions near the Iranian border.
Tribal leaders were give money and significant autonomy over their areas in exchange for their
allegiance, which helped control the countryside and recruitment for the Iraqi army.
The regime's rationale for increasingly relying on the tribes during this period was two-fold. First,
tribal Arabs, although they had become settled, were still considered Bedouin, and thus the most
genuinely Arab, and the most trustworthy in a war against the Persians.
Second, they were believed to have retained tribal values such as communal spirit, honor, and
valor.
For the impoverished tribes, military and government service was a respectable and profitable
livelihood as well as a vehicle for upward mobility.
Saddam Hussein also rewarded the villages of loyal tribesmen by providing roads, electricity, and
water systems.
Cooperating tribal leaders could rely on the government to provide jobs and perks to their
members.
The regime has portrayed tribes as a symbol of patriotism, broadcasting popular forms of
tribal war poetry and stressing tribal values.
It has facilitated the re-establishment of tribal councils to supervise economic activities, resolve
conflicts, and police the region.
It also has armed the more loyal tribes throughout the country.
In other areas of Iraq tribal leaders regained some of their traditional authority as the war forced the
redeployment of Baathist officials to the front.
Because of a weakened economy and the severely reduced ability of the state to provide social
services, many Iraqis increasingly turned to their tribes for support. The renewed alliance between
state and tribe created a new symbiosis: the state advances the favored tribes and the favored
tribes protect the state. In the late 1980s, this state-tribe alliance became official.
During the 1990s, the regime made a conscious effort to appeal selectively along tribal lines.
Particularly in the south, Saddam wooed certain tribal leaders, rewarding some at the expense of
others.
In this was, Shi’a tribal leaders were drafted to help the regime maintain its grip on the rebellious
south.
But by co-opting selected Shi’a leaders, the regime reversed a decades-old tradition by which the
Shi’a were excluded from access to the spoils of office.
Saddam’s incarnation as the chief of chiefs cut across the sectarian divide with an appeal based on
tribal rather than sectarian identity.
In so far as this was a more “inclusive” mode of governance, it came at a considerable cost as the
underlying social and political order in Iraq became yet more fragmented and dysfunctional
The success of the regime's tribal policy was demonstrated when several Shia tribes remained on
the sidelines or supported the regime during the 1991 uprising.
Amid the hardships created by the conflict, the flow of resources from the center shrank,
leading to greater self-reliance in tribal areas and the renewed importance of tribal leaders.
The Gulf War, and the grinding international sanctions that followed, accelerated these trends.
In 1996, a high council of tribal chiefs was established and was granted political privilege,
weapons, and land.
Selected tribal leaders were allowed to enrich themselves by any means, fair or foul, and in return
they were expected to defend the regime.
Saddam, in effect, fostered a process of retribalization in Iraq.
Iraq's Arab neighbors, particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia, provide a counterexample.
They won enduring stability by corralling the tribes through a combination of reward and
punishment.
In Transjordan, King Abdullah I and the British -- helped by famine and the effects of the Great
Depression -- confronted recalcitrant tribes militarily and then secured their allegiance with a
steady flow of resources from the emerging state.
More recently, Jordan's Hashemite monarchy has preserved the tribes' loyalty by guaranteeing
them prestigious positions in the government and the military and by playing them off against the
Palestinians.
In Saudi Arabia, the al Saud dynasty consolidated its state by subduing the tribal challenge of
rebellious Ikhwan and then endowing them with status and a military role. Strategic marriages
between the al Saud family and the tribes cemented these ties.
Although such efforts occasionally faltered, the thrust of the policy was always clear: to subordinate
the tribes to the state.
Why didn't tribes disappear under the Baathists?
Overall, tribes have proved to be resilient social structures, enduring through the advent of Islam—
which encourages all Muslims to think of themselves as part of a single community and opposes
some traditional tribal practices— as well as concepts of modern nationalism.
What tribes are the most powerful in Iraq today?
In general, Sunni tribes that were favored by Saddam (although members of some of these
tribes have occasionally attempted to rebel against him).
This includes the Dulaym confederation, which occupies a wide stretch of territory in central Iraq,
and the Shammar, which lives north of Baghdad between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
Other important Sunni tribes include the al-Jaburi, the Ubaydis, and the 'Azza. Saddam particularly
favored members of his own tribe, the al-Bu Nasir— though he also made enemies within the tribe
by murdering members he considered disloyal.
THE BATH REGIME (ECONOMIC CONDITIONS)
Slide
General Qasim, the first of the military rulers, and his key advisors were influenced by
socialist models and emphasized several themes:
a planned economy,
elimination of foreign economic influences (notably in the oil sector),
and land reform.
In 1961, Qasim moved against one of the principal vehicles for foreign involvement in Iraq’s
oil sector, the partly British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC).
The petroleum industry was nationalized in stages from 1961 to 1973.
The predominance of the state in the economic affairs of the nation was further stressed by
a series of expropriations and nationalizations in the 1960s in other sectors.
But also in agriculture, expropriation of land (Land reform), perhaps the most significant of
Qasim’s economic measures, was an ambitious undertaking designed to break up the old feudal
system of land ownership and redistribute land to peasants.
(however, implementation was slow as the government sought to put in place the necessary
machinery to administer the program).
Large-scale industry, banking, insurance and services were nationalized in 1964 (the Arif
government).
The government also reorganized other companies, required profit sharing with workers, and
participation by workers in management.
These and similar measures contributed toward capital flight and departure of trained
management, with an accompanying decline in industrial development during the 1960s.
Slide
The Ba’ath ideology:
There was the message of Arab rebirth; the Arab nation would rise again to recapture its
former glories.
Ba’athism offered a compelling explanation for the failure of the Arabs to achieve the promise of
pan-Arab unity: someone else was to blame – the West.
The potential for Ba’athist ideology to transcend the sectarian and ethnic divide was strengthened
by its economic appeal.
The struggle for power during 1958-68 had left little time for constructive work, and the Ba'th Party
sought
not only to transform the economic system from free enterprise to collectivism
but also to assert the country's economic independence.
The immediate objectives were to increase production
and to raise the standard of living,
but the ultimate objective was to establish a socialist society in which all citizens would enjoy the
benefits of progress and prosperity.
Beginning in 1970 the Ba’ath embarked on a revolutionary program of restructuring the entire fabric
of economic and social life.
Slide
Guided by the socialist principles of Ba’athist ideology, the metamorphosis of Iraq from Third World
to developed country in the space of a decade was driven by two major considerations.
First, was the need to spread wealth more equitably.
Second, the regime needed to diversify Iraq’s economy to avoid overdependence on a single
commodity (oil).
The ambitious plan required resources, and this meant establishing direct control over
Iraq’s massive oil reserves.
The Nationalization of Oil:
Many of the foreign interests involved in the IPC had concessions in other Arab countries;
as a consequence, production from Iraqi wells was often kept deliberately low to ensure a
high price for oil.
In short, while Iraq benefited financially from oil, it did not control the supply or pricing of its major
natural resource.
Nonetheless, any attempt to wrest control over Iraq’s oil from foreign hand would be dangerous.
Saddam personally handled the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry.
To ensure a continued market for Iraqi oil, and to secure technological assistance in the
development of oil new fields, Saddam traveled to Moscow in 1972.
A reciprocal visit by Kosygin in April 1972 15 led to a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
between the two countries (among other thongs: guarantees of Soviet market for Iraqi oil.
Soon after, on June 1, 1972, Law 69 officially nationalized the IPC.
The BOC was nationalized the following year. The Soviets pressured Saddam into power sharing
with the Iraqi Communist Party.
Slide
Several reasons for nationalization:
1. were in line with the Ba’ath Party ideology.
2. also enabled the government to weaken rival power centers, whether landlords, the Shia
business community or foreign oil companies.
3. to satisfy the large sector of the population that was employed by, and dependent on, the
state
Foreign direct investment (FDI) was discouraged in the Baathist era for reasons of economic
nationalism.
Economic Development
The five-year economic plans of 1965-70 and 1971-75 concentrated on raising the level of
production in both agriculture and industry and aimed at reducing dependence on oil revenues
as the primary source for development.
The first plan was primarily concerned with economic independence the final
nationalizations in the oil sector and investment in that sector.
From 1968, the Baathist regime placed greater emphasis on the industrialization
of the economy.
But agriculture lagged far behind target, and industrial development was slow.
The modesty of the goals reflected a consolidation period for the regime, and in part, the
lack of money to achieve more far reaching development goals.
This changed with the oil boom following the first Arab oil embargo.
Given oil revenues, Iraq was able for some years to pursue its socialist model without having to
make hard choices between solvency and other priorities such as welfare benefits, infrastructure
development, and even armed forces modernization.
The country was earning $75 billion a year in the early 1970s from oil exports (in 2003
dollars). Per capita income had peaked at over $7,500 in 1980.
So the second five-year plan (1976-80) reflected an Iraq that was flush with cash and ready
to spend money, nearly $14.2 billion on economic development, often indiscriminately.
During the 1970s oil boom, Iraq paid directly for economic development projects
(plants, industry, and infrastructure) without resorting to credit or foreign ownership.
Heavy industrial complexes such as:
the petrochemical complex at Basra,
the iron and steel mill at Khor al-Zubair,
the development of sulphur and phosphate extraction and processing, and
the fertilizer industries were developed during this period.
In the third five-year plan (1976-80), greater emphasis on agricultural production was noticeable,
and industrial production slowed.
The initial step in agrarian reform had been taken with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1958,
which provided for the distribution to peasants of lands in excess of a certain maximum
ownership.
A decade later, less than half of the land had been distributed.
In 1969 a revised Agrarian Reform Law relieved the peasants from payments for their land
by abolishing compensation to landowners, and a year later a new Agrarian Reform Law was
designed to improve the conditions of the peasantry,
increase agricultural production,
and correlate development in rural and urban areas.
The results were disappointing, however, because of the difficulty of persuading the peasants to
stay on their farms and their inability to improve the quality of agricultural production.
The Ba'th regime also completed work on irrigation projects that had already been under way
and began new projects in areas where water was likely to be scarce in the summer.
Extensive interconnected pipeline system.
In the five-year plan of 1976-80, funds were allocated to complete dams on the Euphrates,
Tigris, Diyala, and Upper Zab rivers and the lake known as al-Tharthar (in northern Iraq).
Recognizing that a rapid transition to full socialism was neither possible nor in the
country's best interest,
the Ba'th provided for a private, though relatively small, sector for private investors, and a third,
mixed sector was created in which private and public enterprises could cooperate.
Ba’ath parties in power in Iraq and Syria, have stopped some way short of total state ownership of
the means of production (a watered down version of communism).
Perhaps the greatest assets of the Ba'th regime were the ambitious plans for reconstruction
and development laid down by its leaders.
Regardless of the oppressive nature of the regime in other respects, in the economic and social
sphere its achievements were truly impressive:
(building hospitals,
schools,
free access to high-quality health care and education,
electrification of rural Iraq,
free refrigerators and TVs were distributed to masses (starting with the Shi’a in the south))
Alongside massive improvement in education, the role of women in society underwent a
radical transformation (the numbers of females receiving education, as teachers, doctors,
and dentists, in the army service.
Much of the success of Ba’athism derived from its capacity to appeal on multiple levels.
The party structure: a cellular network, democratic centralism, the Party was present in every
village, in every factory, in every unit of the army, and in every school.
In the first 20 years of its rule the regime imposed stability on Iraq’s political and social order, while
creating the well-educated, professional middle class that most would consider essential for a
functioning democracy.
In the process, Iraq was to become the most advanced and modern society in the Arab world
(radical land reform that established a network of state-run collective farms).