Secret Deal sees Al Qaeda Leave Fallujah

Over the past ten years Sunni Muslims in Iraq, who used to feel like a majority, have started to feel like a minority. Parallel to the arrest of Sunni politicians, a lot of Sunnis have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws for which the penalty is death. There are disproportionate numbers of Sunnis in prison in Iraq and on death row.

The al-Maliki government organized an amnesty for those who had joined Shiite Muslim militias but it didn’t seem to want to deal with formerly armed Sunni Muslims the same way.

Sunni Muslims also complain that the Iraqi military is only 5 percent Sunni and that only one of the 14 most senior military leaders is Sunni Muslim, and that he is al-Maliki’s man anyway. They also say they are commonly denied government jobs because of their sect, something that is worrying in an oil-funded rentier economy where most of the employment opportunities to date have been provided by the state.

So when al-Maliki talks about a war on terrorism Iraq’s Sunnis feel like he is talking about a war on Sunnis.

Discussions on Facebook give an insight to these feelings. Sunni Muslims in Iraq are reluctant to criticize ISIS online – and of course, this may also be because of fear of repercussions – but they don’t hesitate to criticize the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army and police. Many of the sentiments online indicate that Sunni Muslims are willing to support any group that will take a stand against the government.

“The demonstrations that took place in Anbar were aimed at regaining the rights of Sunni Muslims in Iraq that have been taken away from them over the past ten years,” Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, head of the powerful Dulaim tribe and one of the organizers of the protests, told NIQASH. “We were expecting the government to respond to our demands in some way. But they resorted to force to disperse the demonstrations. And that is what made the sons of the tribes take up arms.”

As Mushreq Abbas, managing editor of newspaper Al Hayat’s Baghdad bureau, put it so cannily: “Were the thousands of gunmen who unprecedentedly appeared on Anbar city streets all members of al-Qaeda?”

More likely they were locals enraged at the dispersal of the protests and angered at the arrest of Sunni Muslim leaders like, most recently, politician Ahmad al-Alwani who is also a member of the Dulaimi tribe – and they saw an opportunity to fight back, or they felt threatened because of the dispersal.