Iraq is in turmoil, again. The country is in the midst of a major crisis sparked by what appears to be a spontaneous outburst of anger over unemployment, poor services and corruption.
Days of anti-govenment protests have convulsed the capital, Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, and several other cities.
To bring you up to date, here is what you need to know.
Thousands of mostly young men have headed waves of protests, which began in Baghdad on Tuesday before spreading to cities dotted throughout Iraq's south.
The protests do not appear to have been coordinated by a particular political group and have seemingly cut across ethnic and sectarian lines.
This could make it more difficult for the year-old government of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to contain the unrest.
Dozens of people have been killed during clashes between demonstrators and security forces, who have attempted to disperse the protests by using live ammunition, tear gas and water cannon.
In addition to those killed, more than 1,000 protesters have been wounded and scores arrested, according to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights.
Curfews have been declared in Baghdad and the southern cities of Nasiriyah, Amara, Najaf and Hilla. Authorities have also imposed a near-total internet blackout in a bid to make it harder for protesters to mobilise.
Angered by Iraq's stuttering recovery from years of conflict, protesters have rallied to demand improved services, more jobs and an end to the corruption that analysts describe as endemic.
The focus of the demonstrators' ire has been not just the government but Iraq's wider political establishment.
Iraq has the world's fourth-largest reserves of oil, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but nearly three-fifths of its 40 million people live on less than $6 a day, World Bank figures show.
Unemployment, particularly among young people, is a major issue, while millions lack access to adequate healthcare, schooling, water or power supplies. Much of the country's infrastructure remains in tatters after decades of near-ongoing conflict, including a United States-led invasion, and United Nations sanctions.
The economic struggles have come despite Iraq enjoying relative stability in recent years after the defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL, ISIS or Daesh) group in the country in 2017.
Abdul Mahdi has warned there is no "magic solution" to Iraq's problems but moved to assuage protesters by offering to meet with "representatives of peaceful demonstrators".
He has also pledged to pass legislation which would grant the country's poorest families a basic income and generate better employment opportunities.
An emergency parliamentary session has been called for Saturday to address the crisis. But Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose political coalition won the most seats in last year's elections, has urged legislators to boycott sessions until the government presents concrete measures addressing the protesters' demands.
The country's top Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged security forces not to use violence and called on the government to heed the demonstrators' demands "before it is too late".
Besides, people in Baghdad are fearful that the next war between the US and Iran will take place in Iraq, which is only just returning to peace after the defeat of Isis. Alarm that Iraq will be sucked into such a conflict has increased here because of recent Israeli drone attacks on the bases of the Iraqi paramilitary group known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, which is accused by the US and Israel of acting as a proxy of Iran.
“The new development is that Israel has entered the conflict in Iraq,” says Abu Alaa al-Walai, the leader of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, a militant Shia paramilitary movement with ties to Iran, speaking in an exclusive interview with The Independent in Baghdad. He says that three Israeli drones attacked one of his bases in the Iraqi capital, called al-Saqr, on 12 August, leading to the explosion of 50 tons of weaponry. The Israelis confirm that they carried out the raid, which was preceded by several others, claiming that they hit Iranian missiles on their way to Syria and Lebanon.
It is the likelihood of US complicity in the Israeli action which could provoke a political crisis in Iraq. Abu Alaa says that an unpublished Iraqi government report on the attack reveals that the Israeli drones were launched from a US base called Kassad in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. “Iraqi radar tracked one out of three of the drones travelling at 140km before, during and after the attack,” he says.
US policy in the Middle East is notoriously incoherent and contradictory under President Trump, but allowing Israel to make pin-prick attacks from a US base against the Hashd looks peculiarly like self-destruction from an American point of view. It has already led to a bill passing through the Iraqi parliament demanding the withdrawal of US forces from the country.
Asked if Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada would attack US forces, if there is a war between the US and Iran, Abu Alaa replies: “Absolutely, yes”. He expresses enthusiasm for drone warfare, saying that the successful drone assault on the Saudi oil facilities on 14 September makes battlefields more equal for groups like his own. “We are working day and night to develop drones that can be put together in a living room,” he says.
Drone attacks on US bases in Iraq would not enjoy the same element of surprise as those on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, but the bases are certainly vulnerable. In many respects, they do not add to US strength in Iraq but they could become American “hostages” in Iraq in the event of an Iran-US conflict.
The future of the Hashd al-Shaabi as an Iranian-influenced state-within-a-state is the crucial issue in the struggle for influence between Iran and the US. Washington is pushing for the role of the Hashd to be reduced or even eliminated, but these efforts are likely to prove ineffective and even counterproductive.
The Hashd is a political as well as a military organisation and is so well established in Iraq that there is not much the US can do to reduce its influence. Its parliamentary representatives did well in the last general election in 2018 and its support is essential for any stable Iraqi government.
A similar pattern has held true in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003. The US wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, though without benefiting Iran. But the downfall of Saddam’s Sunni Arab regime was inevitably followed by a political revolution in which it was replaced by the Shia majority and, to a lesser degree, by the Kurds. Try as they might, US diplomats and generals in Baghdad could not avoid cooperating, often covertly, with Iran.
Not much has really changed in the years that followed. The ruling Shia majority has an Iraqi national identity, but this is matched, and usually overmatched, by a strong religious Shia identity. Given that Iraq and Iran are among the few Shia-led states in the world it is scarcely surprising that they feel that they have much in common. Post-Saddam Iraq saw the first Shia Arab government take power in the region since Saladin overthrew the Fatimids in 12th century Egypt. “Religiously speaking, Iran gives Iraq strategic depth,” says Dhiaa al-Asadi, a leading figure in the populist religious movement of the Shia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.
Donald Trump and previous US administrations have repeatedly made the mistake of denouncing Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Hashd in Iraq as Iranian proxies pure and simple. This is a mistake because these powerful paramilitary movements are rooted, above all else, in the local Shia communities. Iran may have fostered these groups but it does not have command and control over them.
Another reason why Trump’s bid to roll back Iranian influence is unlikely to get anywhere, is that Iran’s paramilitary allies have been victorious, or at least held their own, in the wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen over the last two decades. Many Iraqis resent this fragmentation of power, complaining that “the Hashd is strong and our government is weak” – but there is not a lot they can do about it. Iran is adept at playing Iraqi political chess games and acting as the broker between different factions and centres of power.
The US is not strong enough to oust the Hashd in Iraq, but that does not mean it will not try. The US must have known that Israel was firing drones into Iraq since it controls Iraqi airspace, but using Israel as its proxy in Iraq is a risky game.
Iraq has enjoyed a couple of years of relative peace since the defeat of Isis with the recapture of Mosul in 2017. The hundreds of security checkpoints and concrete anti-bomb blast walls in Baghdad have largely disappeared. The city is full of new restaurants and shops and the streets are thronged with people until late at night. But many Iraqis wonder how long this will last, if the US-Iran confrontation escalates into a shooting war. “Many of my friends are so nervous about a US-Iran war that they are using their severance pay on leaving government service to buy houses in Turkey,” said one civil servant.
There are good reasons for them to be worried: US and Saudi authority in the Middle East has been damaged by "Iranian-inspired attacks" – the Iranian modus operandi is normally to act through others – on oil tankers in the Gulf, a high-flying US drone, and the Saudi oil industry. So far, Trump has not thought it is in the US’s interest to hit back, but he cannot indefinitely absorb this kind of punishment without looking weak.
Iraq is one place where the US and its allies could try to retaliate and their main target is likely to be the Hashd. This could in turn provoke attacks on US bases which look vulnerable in the age of the drone. Iraqis dread the idea of another military conflict, but they fear it may in any case be heading in their direction.
Inside Story: Why are Irakis protesting against the government?
I must repeat that it would be a grave mistake to assume that the continuing political deadlock in Israel – with neither incumbent prime minister Binymain Netanyahu nor his main rival Benny Gantz seemingly able to cobble together a coalition government – is evidence of a deep ideological divide.
In political terms, there is nothing divided about Israel. In this month’s general election, 90 per cent of Israeli Jews voted for parties that identify as being either on the militaristic, anti-Arab right or on the religious, anti-Arab far-right.
The two parties claiming to represent the centre-left – the rebranded versions of Labour and Meretz – won only 11 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Stranger still, the three parties that say they want to form a “broad unity government” won about 60 per cent of the vote.
Netanyahu’s Likud, Gantz’s Blue and White party led by former generals, and ex-defence minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu secured between them 73 seats – well over the 61 seats needed for a majority.
All three support the entrenchment of the occupation and annexation of parts of the West Bank; all three think the settlements are justified and necessary; all demand that the siege of Gaza continue; all view the Palestinian leadership as untrustworthy; and all want neighbouring Arab states cowering in fear.
Moshe Yaalon, Gantz’s fellow general in the Blue and White party, was formerly a pivotal figure in Likud alongside Netanyahu. And Lieberman, before he created his own party, was the director of Netanyahu’s office. These are not political enemies; they are ideological bedfellows.
There is one significant but hardly insumountable difference. Gantz thinks it is important to maintain bipartisan US support for Israel’s belligerent occupation while Netanyahu has preferred to throw Israel’s hand in with Donald Trump and the Christian religious right.
Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s president, has pressed the three parties to work together. He has suggested that Netanyahu and Gantz rotate the role of prime minister between them, a mechanism used in Israel’s past.
But after Gantz refused last week, the president assigned Netanyahu the task of trying to form a government, although most observers think the effort will prove futile. After indecisive elections in April and September, Israel therefore looks to be heading for a third round of elections.
But if the deadlock is not ideological, what is causing it?
In truth, the paralysis has been caused by two fears – one in Likud, the other in Blue and White.
Gantz is happy to sit in a unity government with the Likud party. His objection is to allying with Netanyahu, whose lawyers this week began hearings with the attorney general on multiple counts of fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu wants to be in power to force through a law guaranteeing himself immunity from prosecution.
Blue and White was created to oust Netayahu on the basis that he is corrupt and actively destroying what is left of Israel’s democratic institutions, including by trying to vilify state prosecutors investigating him.
For Blue and White to now prop Netanyahu up in a unity government would be a betrayal of its voters.
The solution for Likud, then, should be obvious: remove Netanyahu and share power with Blue and White.
But the problem is that Likud’s members are in absolute thrall to their leader. The thought of losing him terrifies them. Likud now looks more like a one-man cult than a political party.
Gantz, meanwhile, is gripped by fear of a different kind.
Without Likud, the only solution for Gantz is to turn elsewhere for support. But that would make him reliant on the 13 seats of the Joint List, a coalition of parties representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.
And there’s the rub. Blue and White is a deeply Arab-phobic party, just like Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu. Its only civilian leader, Yair Lapid, notoriously refused to work with Palestinian parties after the 2013 election – before Netanyahu had made racist incitement his campaign trademark.
Lapid said: “I’ll never sit with the Zoabis” – a reference to the most prominent of the Palestinian legislators at the time, Haneen Zoabi.
Similarly, Gantz has repeatedly stressed his opposition to sitting with the Joint List.
Nonetheless, the Joint List’s leader Ayman Odeh made an unprecedented gesture last week, throwing the weight of most of his faction behind Gantz.
That was no easy concession, given Gantz’s positions and his role as army chief in 2014 overseeing the destruction of Gaza. The move angered many Palestinians in the occupied territories.
But Odeh saw the Palestinian minority’s turn-out in September leap by 10 percentage points compared to April’s election, so desperate were his voters to see the back of Netanyahu.
Surveys also indicate a growing frustration among Palestinian citizens at their lack of political influence. Although peace talks are off Israel’s agenda, some in the minority hope it might be possible to win a little relief for their communities after decades of harsh, institutional discrimination.
In a New York Times op-ed last week, Odeh justified his support for Gantz. It was intended to send “a clear message that the only future for this country is a shared future, and there is no shared future without the full and equal participation of Arab Palestinian citizens”.
Gantz seems unimpressed. According to an investigation by the Israeli media, Netahyahu only got first crack at forming a government because Gantz blanched at the prospect.
He was worried Netanyahu would again smear him – and damage him in the eyes of voters – if he was seen to be negotiating with the Joint List.
Netanyahu has already painted the alternatives in stark terms: either a unity government with him at its heart, or a Blue and White government backed by those who “praise terrorists”.
The Likud leader might yet pull a rabbit out of his battered hat. Gantz or Lieberman could cave, faced with taunts that otherwise “the Arabs” will get a foot in the door. Or Netanyahu could trigger a national emergency, even a war, to bully his rivals into backing him.
But should it come to a third election, Netanyahu will have a pressing reason to ensure he succeeds this time. And that will doubtless require stepping up incitement another dangerous gear against the Palestinian minority.
The reality is that there is strong unity in Israel – over shared, deeply ugly attitudes towards Palestinians, whether citizens or those under occupation. Paradoxically, the only obstacle to realising that unity is Netanyahu’s efforts to cling to power.
PALESTINA
When Amnesty International launched a campaign in June 2017 marking 50 years of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, calling on states not to sustain the illegal situation created by Israeli settlements in the West Bank as is required under international law, we knew that achieving its objectives would not be easy.
However, one thing that offered a ray of hope was plans announced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to make public a database listing companies involved in activities in the illegal Israeli settlements. For us, the database was set to be an important tool to ensure transparency around these activities and prompt companies to rethink their operations in the context of a brutal Israeli military occupation and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.
The UN Human Rights Council, in an innovative move, had charged the High Commissioner for Human Rights with creating a database, to be updated annually, of business enterprises involved in activity that, “directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the Israeli settlements” and “raise particular human rights violations concerns.”
Specific activities include the supply of construction and surveillance equipment, the supply of surveillance, security, banking and financial services, the exploitation of natural resources and, more generally, the supply of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.
The purpose of the UN database is quite simple: it is meant to help businesses, and the states in which they are based, take steps to ensure they are not committing or contributing to gross human rights abuses of Palestinians.
Despite being initially due to be finalized by March 2017, the publication of the database has been delayed repeatedly by the OHCHR, initially under former High Commissioner Zeid al-Hussein and now under his successor Michele Bachelet. The exact timing of the database’s release has yet to be announced.
It has become increasingly clear that the delay is in part because certain states are bringing extensive political pressure to bear, not just to put off the database’s release, but to stop it being made public at all. In other words, some powerful states in the UN are lobbying the High Commissioner to simply ignore the mandate she has been given by the Council, or to interpret the mandate in a way that strains all credibility: either by not mentioning companies’ names or not releasing the database at all.
For years, Amnesty International and other international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations have documented how Israel’s policy of developing, expanding and guarding its settlements is inherently discriminatory and results in a wide range of human rights violations affecting every aspect of Palestinians’ lives.
In our latest report on this issue, published in January 2019, we documented the involvement of leading online tourism companies in illegal Israeli settlements. We argued that any business activity in or with settlements unavoidably contributes to sustaining an illegal situation and that companies engaged in these activities directly or indirectly contribute to, and profit from, the maintenance, development and expansion of settlements, which amount to war crimes under international criminal law.
The report welcomed an announcement by Airbnb last year that it would remove all listings in settlements in the occupied West Bank excluding East Jerusalem, but, disappointingly, the company reversed its decision in April 2019.
Even more disturbingly, the current Israeli government is more emboldened than ever to pursue expansion of settlements. In April 2019, for the first time ever, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu openly called for official annexation of parts of the West Bank. He repeated this call in September 2019.
All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a clear international consensus: Israeli settlements are illegal and have devastating consequences for the human rights of Palestinians. A UN Security Council resolution adopted in December 2016 stated that Israel’s settlement activity constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law and has “no legal validity”. It demanded that Israel stop such activity and fulfil its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
However, for decades, official condemnation and quiet diplomacy have failed to bring about necessary change. Now more than ever is the time for concrete action. States must use the next Human Rights Council session on Palestine to demand the release of the database.
The UN has the potential to change the status quo in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The OHCHR should fulfil the mandate given to it by the UN Human Rights Council by compiling, publishing and regularly updating a database of businesses operating in illegal Israeli settlements. We along with 100 other organizations, expressed the hope that these important steps would be undertaken urgently in an open letter addressed to High Commissioner Michele Bachelet in August.
UN member states can play their part by insisting that the High Commissioner should comply with the Human Rights Council’s mandate without further delay. This will bring much needed transparency to business activities in Israeli settlements, facilitate states’ compliance with international law and expedite companies’ progress towards respecting human rights.
BRASIL
VENEZUELA
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