Iraq's Three Civil Wars

By Juan Cole, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted March 6, 2008.

All war situations are a little bit opaque, but from reading the Iraqi press in Arabic, I conclude that there are three major struggles for power of a political and violent sort. What's striking is how little relevance the United States has. It is a superpower, and it is militarily occupying the country, but it appears most frequently to be in the position of going to the parties and saying, "Hey, guys, cut it out. Make nice. Please." It's odd that it should be so powerless in some ways, but let me explain.

So, what are the three wars? There's a war for Basra in the deep south. This is a port city on the Shatt al-Arab. It's the body of water where the Tigris and the Euphrates come together, and they flow together, then out to the Persian Gulf. In the old days, it was a major port, Al Basrah, because the ships could come up the Shatt al-Arab from the Persian Gulf. Now they'll stop instead at a smaller port named Umm Qasr near to Basra, and this is how you get things in and out of Iraq. Last I checked, Iraq was exporting 1.8 million barrels a day of petroleum. Where is it exporting from? Largely from Basra. (There is some, about 300,000 barrels a day going out through the north, but it's a relatively minor amount.) So, basically, import, export, lifeline, and petroleum, are all that is centered in Basra, and if Basra were to collapse, then Iraq collapses. I don't see how the government survives, how anything goes positive in Iraq if Basra collapses, and I cannot figure out what's causing it not to collapse. There is not a good situation down there, as I'll explain.

Then, there's a war for Baghdad. This is the one that Americans tend to know about because the U.S. troops are in Baghdad, and so it's being fought all around our guys, and we are drawn into it from time to time. The American public, when it thinks about this war, mainly thinks about attacks on U.S. troops, which are part of that war because the U.S. troops were seen by the Sunni Arabs as adjuncts to the Shiite paramilitaries, and they have really functioned that way. Most American observers of Iraq wouldn't say that the U.S. is an enabler of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps paramilitaries of these Shiite fundamentalist parties, but you could make the case that, functionally speaking, that's how it's worked out. The U.S. has mainly taken on the remnants of the Ba'ath party, the Salafi jihadis, and other Sunni groups, and has tried to disarm them, tried to kill them, and has opened a space for the Shiite paramilitaries to claim territory and engage in ethnic cleansing and gain territory and power. So that battle between the Sunni Arabs and the Shiite Arabs is going on in Baghdad, is going on in the hinterlands of Baghdad, up to the northeast to Diyala Province, and then south to Babil and so forth.

And finally, as if all that weren't enough, there is a war in the north for control of Kirkuk, which used to be called by Saddam "Ta'mim Province". Kirkuk Province has the city of Kirkuk in it and very productive oil fields, in the old days at least. Kirkuk is not part of the Kurdistan Regional Authority, which was created by melding three northern provinces together into a super province; however, the Kurdistan Regional Authority wishes to annex Kirkuk to the authority.

Regional governments are super-provinces or provincial confederations. Try to imagine what happened -- Iraq had 18 provinces in the old days, but it now has 15 provinces and one regional authority. It would be as though Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana got together, erased their state borders, elected a joint parliament and a prime minister, and then told the Federal leaders in Washington that if they would like to communicate with any of those states, they need to go through the regional prime minister, and by the way, we're not sending any more money to Washington. And don't even think about keeping federal troops on our soil. So, this is what the Kurds have done. They've erased the provincial boundaries that created one Kurdistan government that had -- it has -- its own military. They're giving out visas independent of Baghdad. They're inviting companies in to explore for oil independent of Baghdad. They're the Taiwan of the Middle East. They're an independent country. They just don't say that they are because it would cause a war.

There is a war for Kirkuk in the sense that there are Arabs and Turkmen there that don't want to be part of the Kurdistan Regional Authority. The Kurds, on the other hand, are very insistent on having Kirkuk because if Kurdistan has Kirkuk in the long run, it means Kurdistan is a viable country in its own right. The Turks don't want the Kurds to have Kirkuk, and so on and so forth. And the fighting around Kirkuk -- not only in Kirkuk City and the rest of the province, but in places like Hawija -- extends down to Mosul, a largely Arab city in Ninawa (Ninevah), where 70,000 Kurds have been chased out of Mosul. There's this ethnic cleansing phenomenon of Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen fighting. There's an international dimension because the Kurdistan Regional Authority would like eventually to be an independent country. They're regional expansionists and would like to add more parts of Iraqi provinces to themselves, part of Diyala, all of Kirkuk, part of Ninawa and so forth, and they seem to have an eye on Kurdish populated regions in Iran and in Turkey, ultimately adding them to themselves. This is an aggrandizing, regional, ethnically based new state in the Middle East and, I think, it bears some resemblance to the phenomenon of Serbian nationalism in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. We all know what kind of trouble that caused, and I think similar trouble is coming in the north of Iraq.

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Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the popular blog Informed Comment.

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