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

“Foreign troops cannot liberate a people,” argued al-Daraji, whose son was shot dead by US forces in Najaf in 2005. “If the al-Assad regime is brought down by US forces in the same way that Saddam Hussein was brought down, then Syria won’t be stable for many years.”

Meanwhile in the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq’s important ethnic minority, the Kurdish, share those concerns about foreign intervention in Syria. Many Kurdish would be happy to see al-Assad gone, however that happens, because they believe it will potentially give Syria’s Kurdish minority the chance for autonomy too. For a long time, Syria’s Kurds were oppressed by the al-Assad regime, even denied Syrian nationality.

Nonetheless Iraq’s Kurds are not sure that intervention in Syria is a good idea. “The experience in Iraq proves that foreign intervention is not a solution,” says Sulaymaniyah local, Zamnako Mohammed. “I believe the result could be an ongoing civil war.”

Mohammed also thinks that inadvertent foreign support of extremist groups in Syria is a terrible idea. “It is important that these groups do not stay in Syria,” he says.

Meanwhile Erbil local, Soran Saeed, disagrees: he thinks the international community should intervene to get rid of al-Assad. “If the UN Security Council had intervened against al-Assad two years ago then he wouldn’t have been able to kill so many Syrians in the meantime,” says Saeed, who had just been watching news footage of the victims of chemical weapons in Gouta, Syria. He says it reminded him and other Kurds of chemical weapons used against them in Halabja in 1988 by Saddam Hussein.

While many ordinary Iraqis seem to be worried about intervention – and rightfully so – their politicians are supposed to be remaining neutral ad not taking any particular side. Iraq has refrained from voting in the Arab League on more than one occasion, when the decision would have impacted the al-Assad regime negatively.

Politically, the various different parties in Iraq have divergent opinions about events in Syria – and mainly this is due to whether or not they support the al-Assad regime.

Parties dominated by Sunni Muslim politicians accuse their Shiite Muslim Prime Minister of tacitly supporting al-Assad because of links to Iran, which also supports al-Assad. They say that the Iraqi government is allowing the Iranians to transport weapons to the Syrian regime through Iraqi airspace as well as assisting with the mobilization of young Iraqi Shiite Muslims to go and fight for al-Assad in Syria.

In reply, Iraq’s Shiite Muslim politicians accuse their Sunni Muslim counterparts of trying to overthrow al-Assad because they’re acting on an agenda given them by mainly Sunni Muslim Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.