For Americans, it was like news from nowhere. Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country the US had invaded and blown a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq. In 2011, the last US combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads “held high,” as US President Barack Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans. So the headlines of recent weeks – “Iraq's army collapses”; “Iraq's second largest city falls to insurgents”; “Terrorist caliphate established in Middle East” – could not have seemed more shocking. Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neo-cons who had planned and supported the 2003 invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday. Iraq was again the story of the moment. Post-mortems began to appear: commentators were asking how in the world this could be happening. Iraqis, of course, don't have the luxury of ignoring what has been going on in their country since 2011. For them, whether Sunni or Shiite, the recent unravelling of the army, a series of revolts across the Sunni parts of Iraq, the advance of an extremist insurgency on the country's capital, Baghdad, and the embattled position of the autocratic government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki were, if not predictable, at least expected. And as the killings ratcheted up, caught in the middle were the vast majority of Iraqis, people who were neither fighters nor directly involved in the corrupt politics of their country. They found themselves, as always, caught in the vice-like grip of the violence once more engulfing their country. An Iraqi friend I've known since 2003 lives in a predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad. He had survived the sectarian bloodletting of 2006-2007 in which many of his Sunni compatriots were killed or driven from the capital. He recently emailed me. This is the picture he painted of what life is now like for him, his wife, and their small children: “All the dangers faced by Iraqis from the occupation – arrests, torture, car bombs, and sectarian violence – those killings have become like toys in comparison to what we are facing these days. “Fighting has spread in all directions, from the north, east, and west of Baghdad. Much of the fighting is between the government and Sunni insurgents who have suffered a lot from the injustice of Al-Maliki's sectarian government.” He continued: “As a result of this fighting, we can't sleep because of our fear of the uncertainty of the situation and because of the random arrests of innocent Sunni people. Each day I awake and find myself in a very hard and bad situation and now am trying to think of any way I can to leave here and save my family. “Most of my neighbours left back when it was easier to leave. Now, we have both the US and Iran helping the Iraqi government, and this will only make the fighting that is going on across Iraq much worse. “Life in Iraq has become impossible and even more dangerous, and there is now no way to leave. To the north, west, and east of Baghdad there is fighting, and with so many groups of Shiite militias in the south it is not safe for us to go there because of the sectarianism that was never here before the invasion. “The price of bus tickets has become very expensive, and the buses are all booked up for months. So many Iraqi families are trapped in the middle now. “Every day, the Iraqi army is raiding homes and arresting innocent people. Many dead bodies were found at the Baghdad morgue in the days following the mass arrests in Sunni areas.” He concluded his email on a stark note, reminiscent of the things I regularly heard when I was in Iraq covering the brutal results of the US occupation: “Horror, fear, arbitrary arrests, indiscriminate bombing, killing, an uncertain future – this is the new democratic Iraq.” Don't for a second think that it's just Sunni communities that are living in fear. Claims of massacres and other atrocities being carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the group spearheading the Sunni revolt across the northern and western parts of the country, abound, along with well-documented accounts of its brutal tactics against the Shiites. In one incident, according to witnesses, ISIS forces kidnapped at least 40 Shia Turkmen, blew up three Shia mosques and another Shia shrine, and raided homes and farms in two Shia villages near the city of Mosul. And that's just to start down a long list of horrors. Meanwhile, the sectarianism shredding the social fabric is being stoked further by the posting of images online that show at least ten ancient Shiite shrines and mosques destroyed by ISIS fighters. THE DISINTEGRATION OF IRAQ: I can't claim to be surprised by the events of recent weeks. Back in March 2013, on a visit to the embattled Sunni city of Fallujah (twice besieged and largely destroyed by US troops in the occupation years), I saw many signs of the genesis of what was to come. I was at one point on a stage alongside half a dozen tribal and religious leaders from the area. Tens of thousands of enraged men, mostly young, filled the street below us, holding up signs expressing their anger toward the US-backed prime minister, Al-Maliki. Having written about the myriad human rights abuses and violations Al-Maliki's regime was responsible for, I was familiar with the way the bodies, dignity, and rights of much of the Sunni population in Fallujah's province, Al-Anbar, had been abused. That same month I had interviewed a woman who used the alias Heba al-Shamary. She had just been released from an Iraqi prison after four grim years. “I was tortured and raped repeatedly by the Iraqi security forces,” she told me. “I want to tell the world what I and other Iraqi women in prison have had to go through over these last years. It has been a hell … I was raped over and over again. I was kicked and beaten and insulted and spat upon.” Heba, like many of the Sunnis the Al-Maliki regime has decided to detain, torture, and sometimes execute, had been charged with “terrorism.” That very month, the international human rights group Amnesty International released a report that highlighted what it called “a grim cycle of human rights abuses” in Iraq. When I was in Baghdad, it was common to hear Al-Maliki referred to as “worse than former president Saddam [Hussein].” In late 2012, the young among the politically disenfranchised Sunni population began to organise peaceful, Arab Spring-style rallies against the government. These were met with brute force, and more than a dozen demonstrators were killed by government security forces. Videos of this went viral on the Web, stirring the already boiling tempers of youths desperate to take the fight for their rights to Baghdad. “We demand an end to checkpoints surrounding Fallujah. We demand they allow in the press [to cover the situation]. We demand they end their unlawful home raids and detentions. We demand an end to federalism and gangsters and secret prisons”: This was what Sheikh Khaled Hamoud al-Jumaili, a leader of the demonstrations, told me just before I went on the panel that day. As we spoke, he clutched a photograph of one of his nephews, killed by Al-Maliki's forces while demonstrating in the nearby city of Ramadi. “Losing our history and dividing Iraqis is wrong, but that and kidnapping and conspiracies and displacing people is what Al-Maliki is doing,” he said. The sheikh went on to tell me that many people in Al-Anbar province had stopped demanding changes in the Al-Maliki government because they had lost hope. After years of waiting, none of their demands had been met. “Now we demand a change in the regime, and a change in the constitution, ” he said. “We will not stop these demonstrations. This one we have labelled ‘last-chance Friday' because it is the government's last chance to listen to us.” “What comes next if they don't listen to you?” I asked. “Maybe armed struggle comes next,” he replied. Al-Maliki's response to the Fallujah protests, in fact, ensured that the sheikh's prediction would come true. The feverish energy on the stage and in the crowd that day was a mix of anticipation, anxiety and fear. All of this energy had to go somewhere. Even then, local religious and tribal leaders were lagging behind their supporters. Keeping a lid on the seething cauldron of Sunni feeling was always unlikely. When a tribal sheikh asked the crowd for a little more time for further “diplomacy” in Baghdad, the crowd erupted in angry shouts, rushed the stage, and began pelting the sheikhs with water bottles and rocks. In pockets of the crowd, now a mob, the ominous black flags of ISIS were waving alongside signs that read “Iraqis did not vote for an Iranian dictatorship.” Enraged shouts of “We will now fight!” and “No more Al-Maliki!” swept over us as we fled the stage. Projectiles were being hurled at us. The youth were enraged, desperate for a target, and open to recruitment into a movement that would take the fight to the Al-Maliki regime. ENTER ISIS: Radical Islamist fighters in Syria opposed to President Bashar al-Assad have been expanding in strength and lethality for the past three years. They receive Arabian Gulf petrodollars from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, among other places. For some time they have also enjoyed the tacit support of the Obama administration. This winter, they and their branches in Iraq converged, first taking Fallujah, then moving on to the spring and summer debacles across Sunni Iraq and the establishment of a “caliphate” in the territories they control in both countries. It was hardly news that ISIS, a group even the original Al-Qaeda rejected, had a strong presence in Syria. US Secretary of State John Kerry was defensive when he spoke of the situation last fall. He attempted to explain Washington's increasingly controversial and confused policy on Syria, the rebels, and the regime of Al-Assad they were trying to overthrow. He described the “bad guys” as radical fighters belonging to ISIS and Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, calling them the lesser part of the opposition in that country, a statement that even then was beyond inaccurate. He went on to describe those “bad guys” as having “proven themselves to be probably the best fighters … the most trained and aggressive on the ground.” Of course, Kerry claimed that the US was only supporting the “good guys,” another convenient fiction of the moment. Fast forward to just a few weeks ago: in a meeting with the Syrian opposition leader Ahmad al-Jarba, Kerry proposed arming and training supposedly well-vetted “moderate” Syrian rebels to take the battle to ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. Said Kerry: “Obviously, in the light of what has happened in Iraq, we have even more to talk about in terms of the moderate opposition in Syria, which has the ability to be a very important player in pushing back against [ISIS's] presence and to have them not just in Syria, but also in Iraq.” The confusion of this policy remains stunning: Washington hopes to use “moderate” Syrian rebels, in practice almost impossible to separate from the extreme Islamists, “in pushing back against” those very Islamists, while striking against the Al-Assad regime which is supporting, with air strikes, among other things, the Al-Maliki government, which Washington has been arming and supporting in Iraq. The US has already invested more than US$25 billion in support of Al-Maliki, at least US$17 billion of which was poured into the Iraqi military. Clearly that was money not well spent as the army promptly collapsed, surrendering a string of cities and towns, including Tal Afar and Mosul, when ISIS and other Sunni insurgents came knocking. More aid and personnel are now on the way from Washington. The Obama administration already admits to sending at least an extra 750 Marines and Special Operations troops into Iraq, along with missile-armed drones and Apache helicopters. It is now pushing hard to sell Iraq another 4,000 Hellfire missiles. The Pentagon insists its troops in Baghdad are either guarding the huge US embassy or serving in an “advisory” capacity to the Iraqis. But is also claims that its forces need “flexibility” in order to carry out their missions. As a result, there are already plans for US pilots to fly Apache attack helicopters there. While Washington might be at odds with Russia's President Vladimir Putin over the crisis in Ukraine, the Obama administration is undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief that Russian military aid, including fighter planes, is now flowing into Baghdad. Blurring political alliances further, Iran has supplied Iraq with ground-attack jets, has drones carrying out reconnaissance missions over the country, and Iranian Kurds could be joining the fight on the ground. Considering all these twists and turns of the Iraqi situation, political analyst Maki al-Nazzal shared these thoughts with me, which are increasingly typical of Sunni opinion: “Iraq is still suffering from the US occupation's sins and is now operating to remove the cancer the US planted in its body. Iraqi nationalists and Sunni Islamists have had enough of being wasted through 11 years of direct and indirect occupation and so have revolted to correct by guns what was corrupted by wrongful politics.” Meanwhile, the ongoing crisis has sent the government in Baghdad into free-fall just as the opportunistic Kurds of northern Iraq have called for a referendum in the next two months to address their long-delayed desire to become an independent country. Given all of this, there is little hope that a Sunni-Shia-Kurdish “unity” government can be formed to save the country from collapse. Making matters worse, with thousands of Iraqis being slaughtered every month and the country coming apart at the seams, even the Shiites in the country's parliament seem deadlocked. “Things are moving faster than the politicians can make decisions,” a senior Shiite member of parliament told a reporter. No wonder the Iraqi army won't stand its ground when facing ISIS fighters, who are more than willing to die for their cause. What exactly is the Iraqi army to die defending? And it's not just army troops who are refusing to put their lives on the line for Nuri al-Maliki. Powerful Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's volatile Al-Anbar province are also refusing to fight for Al-Maliki. In a recent interview, Sheikh Hatem al-Suleiman, head of the Dulaimi tribe, insisted that Al-Maliki was more dangerous than the ISIS fighters, adding, “I believe that Al-Maliki is responsible for ISIS coming to Iraq.” Washington's man in Baghdad for so long, Al-Maliki himself now adds to the crisis by refusing to budge, no matter the pressure from his former patrons and Shiite religious leaders. THE NIGHTMARE OF ORDINARY IRAQIS: The disintegration of Iraq is the result of US policies that, since 2003, have been strikingly devoid of coherence or any real comprehension when it comes to the forces at play in the country or the region. They have had about them an aura of puerility, of “good guys” versus “bad guys,” that will leave future historians stunned. Worst of all, they have generated a modern-day Middle Eastern catch-22 situation in which all sides are armed, funded, and supported directly or indirectly by Washington or its allies. Meanwhile, ISIS and other Sunni insurgent groups have effectively tapped into the tens of thousands of angry young men I saw in Fallujah last year and are reportedly enjoying significant popular support (seen, in some cases, as the best of a series of terrible options) in many of the towns and cities where they have set up shop. In all of this, the nightmare for ordinary Iraqis has only been accentuated. I recently received an email from a friend in Fallujah, a city now occupied by ISIS after having been brutally shelled by the Iraqi military earlier this year. At that time, hundreds were killed and even Fallujah's main hospital was hit. Tens of thousands of people in the city, including my friend, had to flee for their lives. He has been a refugee for months. “Words cannot explain what we are suffering now,” he wrote. “I do not believe what is happening to us. Imagine a life lived in permanent fear, with shortages of all-important services like electricity, water supply, fuel, and food in the very hot Iraqi summer and during the fasting month of Ramadan. “The most important part of the whole story is that all of these tragedies are happening, and, let me say with sadness, are happening while we are now refugees and deprived of our houses and belongings. Fleeing Al-Maliki's bombardment, we travelled to Anah [northwest of Fallujah and closer to the Syrian border] seeking safety, but now Anah has become unsafe and was attacked twice by Syrian helicopters, which killed five Fallujan civilian refugees. Everything in our life is sad and difficult. We are under the control of senseless criminals.” As Iraq's disintegration into darkness continues, it sickens me to think of all the Iraqis I met and became friends with who have since been killed, disappeared, or have become refugees. What is left of Iraq, this mess that is no longer a country, should be considered the legacy of decades of US policy there, dating back to the time when Saddam Hussein was in power and enjoyed Washington's support. With Al-Maliki, it has simply been a different dictator, enjoying even more such support (until these last few weeks), and using similarly barbaric tactics against Iraqis. Today, Washington's policies continue in the same mindless way as more fuel is rushed to the bonfire that is incinerating Iraq. The writer made regular reporting trips to Iraq between 2003 and 2014. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism in 2008, for his work as an unembedded journalist in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.
