Battle Reveals Ethnic Muddle in Iraq

[leftchick]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_deepening_tangle&cid=540&ncid=1480


TAL AFAR, Iraq - After Najaf and Fallujah, suddenly it has been Tal Afar's turn to follow the familiar pattern: militants move in, U.S. forces fight to drive them out and local leaders get caught in the middle trying to broker peace.


The battle for this northern Iraqi city has highlighted the tangle of ethnicities that the U.S.-led coalition has to deal with and the fragility of its control over the country.


From Shiite strongholds in Basra, Nasiriyah, Kut and Najaf through the so-called "Sunni Triangle" of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, coalition forces for 17 months have been waging battles against insurgents with varying degrees of success, rarely registering any big, clear-cut victories.


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The city of 250,000 is an ethnic stew of Turks intermarried with Arabs, re-embracing their Turkish roots after years of submission to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s efforts to "Arabize" the country. Then there are the Kurds next door, who claim Tal Afar as part of their enclave.

[StevieM]

1. Iraq is a mess

I don't think there was ever a real country there. It was just put together by the British. Without a dictator I am not sure if it can hold together. Too many people don't identify themselves as Iraqis.

And the problem goes much deeper then the media-simplified description of "Shiites in the south, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds up north". Nations are not defined by allied no-fly zones either. (And the Kurds are Sunnis). There are divisions up North in the Kurdish strong hold, divisions between Shiite tribes, tribes that have Sunnis and Shiites and in central Iraq there are diverse groups, including Armenians and Chaldean Christians.

Iraq was not the ideal place to set up "a model of democracy for the Middle East." It is like trying to create Switzerland times twenty.

There is definitely a problem with national identification in the Arab world's countries, and I think that's why the windstorm of democracy that spread through Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s skipped them over. Egyptian President Nasser once said, "Egypt is the only real country in the Arab world."

Steve

[starroute]

2. Iraq has always been pulled both ways

Ethnically, there's always been a division between north and south -- that's been true for the last 50,000 years. The south is Arab and the north isn't.

But the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers form a powerful unifying factor, and that's also been true since at least the rise of agriculture. There are strong economic and political reasons for Iraq to remain a single nation, and it would be to nobody's benefit if it splintered.