Should US go into Syria: What do Ordinary Iraqis Think?

However, al-Jumaili added, US military intervention did not seem like a good idea. “Foreign intervention – even if it is to overthrow a dictator – will bring calamity,” al-Jumaili said and added that he hoped the Syrians would never have to deal with the same problems the Iraqis had.

“There is no doubt that any military strike on Syria would have repercussions on Iraq,” Saleh al-Issawi, a member of Anbar’s provincial council, told NIQASH. “And we don’t want that.”

Over the past few months there have been a series of serious and confrontational protests in Anbar, against the Shiite Muslim-dominated government in Baghdad, headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And it is fairly common now for the mostly Sunni Muslim protest leaders to denounce al-Assad, who’s also classified as a Shiite Muslim, at the end of sermons on Friday; they also call for the end of his rule in Syria. Until now though, the protest leaders haven’t made any positive mention of US intervention.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Iraqi’s Shiite Muslims tend to oppose military intervention in Syria too, although for different reasons than Iraq’s Sunnis. Firstly, although they may not like dictators much either, they believe that any foreign intervention would aid the sector of Syrian rebels they don’t particularly like: the Sunni Muslim extremists who are fighting in Syria in groups like the Al Nusra Front. They fear that extremists like this, who are connected to groups like al-Qaeda, will either impose strict Islamic law on Syria or that they will start an ongoing, sectarian-based civil war such as that Iraq went through.

Indeed, the fact that groups like this are in Syria has seen hundreds of young Shiite Muslim men from Iraq go to Syria to fight for al-Assad - although they may well be going for religious rather than political reasons.

It seems as though, even though al-Assad leads the Syrian Baath party – the same party Hussein led and which was much despised by Iraqis – the fact that al-Assad is a Shiite Muslim still trumps the fact that he leads a Baath party, for many Iraqi Shiites. Clearly what Shiite Muslim clerics and politicians say, also has an effect on popular opinions.

“There is a plan being sponsored by Turkey and by the Gulf states to attack Shiite Muslims in the Middle East,” one resident in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, Abbas al-Daraji, told NIQASH. “They don’t want to get rid of al-Assad because he is a dictator. They want to get rid of him so they can move ahead with this plan.”