Iraqi Sects Join Battle in Syria on Both Sides
By YASIR GHAZI and TIM ARANGO
Published: October 27, 2012 - New York Times
BAGHDAD — Militant Sunnis from Iraq have been going to Syria to fight against President Bashar al-Assad
for months. Now Iraqi Shiites are joining the battle in increasing
numbers, but on the government’s side, transplanting Iraq’s explosive
sectarian conflict to a civil war that is increasingly fueled by
religious rivalry.
Syrian soldiers at the explosion site where a car
bomb exploded near Sayyida Zeinab, a Shiite shrine, in June 2012.
Some Iraqi Shiites are traveling to Tehran first, where the Iranian
government, Syria’s chief regional ally, is flying them to Damascus,
Syria’s capital. Others take tour buses from the Shiite holy city of
Najaf, Iraq, on the pretext of making a pilgrimage to an important
Shiite shrine in Damascus that for months has been protected by armed
Iraqis. While the buses do carry pilgrims, Iraqi Shiite leaders say,
they are also ferrying weapons, supplies and fighters to aid the Syrian
government.
“Dozens of Iraqis are joining us, and our brigade is growing day by
day,” Ahmad al-Hassani, a 25-year-old Iraqi fighter, said by telephone
from Damascus. He said that he arrived there two months ago, taking a
flight from Tehran.
The Iraqi Shiites are joining forces with Shiite fighters from Lebanon
and Iran, driving Syria ever closer to becoming a regional sectarian
battlefield.
Lebanon, which has 100,000 Syrian refugees, was pushed to the brink this month when a Sunni intelligence chief was assassinated in a bombing.
Many Lebanese blamed the Syrian government and its allies for the
attack. Jordan, sheltering more than 180,000 refugees, has struggled to
contain the violence on its border, which claimed the life of a
Jordanian soldier in a firefight with extremists last week. Turkey, with more than 100,000 refugees, has traded artillery fire with Syria since Syrian shelling killed five civilians near the border early this month.
Now Iraq, still haunted by its own sectarian carnage, has become
increasingly entangled in the Syrian war. And Iran, which, like Iraq, is
majority-Shiite, appears to be playing a critical role in mobilizing
Iraqis.
According to interviews with Shiite leaders here, the Iraqi volunteers
are receiving weapons and supplies from the Syrian and Iranian
governments, and Iran has organized travel for Iraqis willing to fight
in Syria on the government’s side.
Iran has also pressed the Iraqis to organize committees to recruit young
fighters. Such committees have recently been formed in Iraq’s Shiite
heartland in the south and in Diyala Province, a mixed province north of
Baghdad.
Many Iraqi Shiites increasingly see the Syrian war — which pits the
Sunni majority against a government dominated by Alawites, an offshoot
of Shiite Islam — as a battle for the future of Shiite faith. This
sectarian cast has been heightened by the influx of Sunni extremists
aligned with Al Qaeda, who have joined the fight against the Syrian
government much as they did in the last decade against the Shiite-led
Iraqi government.
“Syria is now open to all fighters, and Al Qaeda is playing on the
chords of sectarianism, which will spur reactions from the Shiites, as
happened in Iraq,” said Ihsan al-Shammari, an analyst and professor at
Baghdad University’s College of Political Science. “My biggest fear from
the Syrian crisis is the repercussions for Iraq, where the ashes of
sectarian violence still exist.”
One young Iraqi, Ali Hatem, who was planning to travel to Tehran, then
to Damascus, said he saw the call to fight for Mr. Assad as part of a
“divine duty.”
Abu Mohamed, an official in Babil Province with the Sadrist Trend, a
political party aligned with the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr,
said he recently received an invitation from the Sadrists’ leadership
to a meeting in Najaf to discuss a pilgrimage to the shrine of Sayyida
Zeinab, a holy Shiite site in Damascus.
“We knew that this is not the real purpose because the situation is not
suitable for such a visit,” he said. “When we went to Najaf, they told
us it’s a call for fighting in Syria against the Salafis,”
ultraconservative Sunni Muslims.
A senior Sadrist official and former member of Parliament, speaking on
condition of anonymity, said that convoys of buses from Najaf,
ostensibly for pilgrims, were carrying weapons and fighters to Damascus.
Religious warriors, however, do not always make such distinctions. In
Diyala Province, still a hotbed of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, Shiite
leaders say they are seeking volunteers for a “combat regiment” to
defend the Zeinab shrine against “the holders of extremist Salafi
ideology backed by gulf states,” according to Abu Ali al-Moussawi, the
head of a recruitment committee. He said that 70 men from Diyala had
recently left to join the fight in Syria.
Abu Sajad, who moved to Damascus in 2008 and joined the fight after the
rebellion began, said he and other Iraqi fighters were indeed fighting
to protect the shrine. A former fighter in Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army in
Iraq, he said he was given weapons and supplies by the Syrian
government.
But as the fight evolved, and Iraqis began to be killed and kidnapped,
it reminded him too much of the Iraq he left, and so he recently
returned to his home in Basra.
“I can tell that things are going to be crazy in Syria,” he said. “It’s a
sectarian war, and it’s even worse than the one we had here, which was
between the militias and the political parties. In Syria, all of the
people are involved. You can feel the hatred between the Sunnis and the
Alawites. They will do anything to get rid of each other.”
Iraqi Shiites did not initially take sides in Syria. Many Shiites here
despise Mr. Assad for his affiliation with the Baath Party, the party of
Saddam Hussein, and the support he gave foreign Sunni fighters during
the Iraq war.
But as the uprising became an armed rebellion that began to attract
Sunni extremists, many Shiites came to see the war in existential terms.
Devout Shiites in Iraq often describe the Syrian conflict as the
beginning of the fulfillment of a Shiite prophecy that presages the end
of time by predicting that an army, headed by a devil-like figure named
Sufyani, will rise in Syria and then conquer Iraq’s Shiites.
It was the bombing of an important shrine in Samarra in 2006 that
escalated Iraq’s sectarian civil war, and many Iraqis see the events in
Syria as replicating their own recent bloody history, but with even
greater potential consequences.
Hassan al-Rubaie, a Shiite cleric from Baquba, the capital of Diyala
Province, said, “The destruction of the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab in
Syria will mean the start of sectarian civil war in Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.”
Labels: Conflict, Iran, Iraq, Islamism, Middle East, Political Realities, Societal Failures, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 28, 2012
<< Home