Truman Project Executive Director Michael Breen wrote about the current situation in Iraq and the horrors it presents to the civilian population. He offers two possible shifts that need to occur to improve the situation: a break between Sunni tribal leaders and ISIL and reconciliation between Sunni leaders and Baghdad.
During my time in Iraq and Syria, first as a soldier and then as a refugee advocate, I have had the pleasure of knowing many Sunni-Shia couples — some of whom charmingly dub their children “sushi.” During the initial reconstruction of Baghdad, I knew them as friends and colleagues. Later, as opportunistic fanatics of all stripes began turning Iraqis against one another through acts of ever-escalating violence, I knew them as courageous but increasingly threatened moderates. In the final years of the Iraq War, and through the civil war in Syria, I have mostly known them as refugees, survivors of violence and torture, widows, and orphans.
The horror of the current Sunni-Shia split is neither the essential nature of the Middle East nor its inevitable destiny. Conflict between Sunni and Shia, we are too often told, is an ancient and intractable reality. Yet, it has been over 1300 years since Hussein and Ali died at the hands of the Umayyid caliph in Karbala — and for the vast majority of that time, Sunni and Shia lived together peacefully in the great cities of the cosmopolitan Levant. Together, they built businesses, raised families, and crafted scientific and cultural achievements that stand as enduring gifts to mankind. Far from the normal state of affairs, today’s ongoing sectarian bloodletting is instead the awful fruit of deliberate and brutal opportunism by extremists of all stripes.
ISIL, the extremist band-cum-army that has seized control of much of Iraq and Syria, has taken a number of forms since its inception, most often distributed within populations and difficult to target. For a fleeting moment after the fall of Mosul, however, ISIL was a conventional motorized infantry force on an open field run, convoying on highways and flying flags. If American air power had been within reach, and if a political decision to use it quickly had been made, it might have been a game-changer. The most straightforward way to separate an extremist group from a civilian population, after all, is to stop them from reaching population centers in the first place.
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