ASHLEY SMITH interviews ANAND GOPAL
A camp flooded with refugees from the ongoing disaster caused by U.S. imperialism in Iraq
What are conditions like in Iraq today?
The civil war that the U.S. invasion helped unleash has not really ended. Rather, it continues in a different form.
Pro-Iran parties dominate the government, the number of Shia militias and death squads has skyrocketed in the past six months, and large parts of central and northern Iraq are under the sway of ISIS or other Sunni insurgent groups. In Baghdad, neighborhoods remain divided. Nearly daily, Sunnis are picked up by Shia militias, and their tortured bodies are delivered to the morgue. In reprisal, Sunni insurgents wheel car bombs into crowded Shia areas, killing dozens, almost all civilians.
Has Obama been effective at all in his stated strategy of building unity between the elites of the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities in Iraq?
Very ineffective. His administration is prioritizing a very narrow version of counter-terrorism to defeat ISIS over political reconciliation and state-building. As a result, Obama has backed the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi army, which work hand in hand with Shia militias and Shia death squads. This has actually sharpened sectarian divisions throughout the country.
For example, there’s a highway running from Baghdad up to Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq. Before the rise of ISIS, there were Iraqi army checkpoints along this highway. Last year, ISIS swept in and took swathes of territory along this highway. The Iraqi security forces have since retaken it from ISIS, but they have allowed Shia militias to set up checkpoints to harass and repress Sunnis. The net effect over the past year is the replacement of army checkpoints with Shia militia checkpoints.
When ISIS took Mosul in June, it became an excuse used by the Iraqi government to sanction new Shia militias–as a result, they have bloomed in the past six months. Driving through Baghdad, you see billboards for Iranian-backed Shia militias everywhere. There are posters of current Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei in many parts of the city.
In many ways, these Shia militias are no different than ISIS. They behead, they torture, they kill Sunnis or anyone who disagrees with them. The difference is that the U.S. supports them, and so the media doesn’t highlight their atrocities.
What impact have these militias had on ISIS’s recruitment of people from the Sunni population of Iraq?
To understand why ISIS has grown, you should look back to the period before the movement’s current rise.
For the last several years, Iraq’s former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki led a sectarian Shia government that systematically discriminated against Sunnis. In reaction, Sunnis rose up in a protest movement in cities of Anbar province, like Ramadi and Falluja.
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