Mick Hartley

An interesting perspective on the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq, and how it resurfaced post-Saddam:

Shatha al-Musawi, a Shi’ite member of parliament, first encountered the Sunni-Shi’ite divide on the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. Hearing the news with a close Sunni friend named Sahira, al-Musawi erupted like a child.

“I jumped, I shouted, I came directly to Sahira and I hugged her,” al-Musawi said. “I was crying, and I said, ‘Sahira, this is the moment we waited for.’”

At least it should have been: Saddam’s henchmen killed al-Musawi’s father when she was only 13; Sahira, too, was a victim, losing her closest uncle to the Saddam government.

But instead of celebrating, Sahira stood stiffly. A day later, al-Musawi said, Sahira’s eyes were red from crying. And before long, like so many Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq, the two stopped talking.

Sectarianism has come to haunt her. She entered politics four years ago, flush with idealism, working closely with Sunnis on Iraq’s Constitution and a draft law that would compensate victims of Saddam.

Now, even for her, one of parliament’s most independent figures, the urge to reconcile is being blacked out by distrust and visceral anger. […]

“Mr Bush promised Iraq would be a democratic and free country,” she said. “And we believed that.” Then she laughed. It did not take long, she said, before Iraq started to fracture.

In al-Musawi’s mixed neighbourhood of Adel, Shi’ite mosques and religious schools closed by the Sunni-dominated government began to reopen after Saddam’s fall.

Some Sunni Arabs, she said, felt threatened. Soon, Sunni customers at the tailor’s shop where she worked stopped visiting.

Violence followed. In late 2003, al-Musawi said, she saw two cars of men abduct an official at a Shi’ite mosque, tie him to a car and drag him through the streets. Some of the attackers were young men she had known as boys.

“Are you crazy?” she shouted. “Have you lost your minds?”

She began looking to politics “as a way to restore some sanity”, she said. After starting a popular women’s group, she became one of only two women elected to her neighbourhood’s district council.

In 2004 and 2005, five Shi’ite council members were killed, most of them assassinated.

Around the same time, gunmen killed the Shi’ite mayor of Baghdad, Haider Ali, who lived two houses away from her. She said another neighbour, a Sunni and one of Ali’s guards, was probably responsible.

“We were shocked, really,” she said. “We used to have friends, neighbours. In every moment, when you met a person, you didn’t think: Is he Shia or Sunni?”

Then at some point, she said, it switched; sect became the defining characteristic for Iraqis. […]

In parliament three months ago, she shouted down her colleagues for standing by as Sunni extremists in Diyala Province killed hundreds of Shi’ites. When the speaker, a Sunni, smirked, she screamed: “Why are you laughing, Mr Speaker? I want to know why you’re laughing.” (He waved her away: “Leave it to the women,” he said.)

Al-Musawi also now defends some actions of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, saying that it has filled a necessary void.

“The government couldn’t protect the people,” she said. “They couldn’t save them. The Sadrists did that.”

When asked about accusations that the Mahdi Army forced innocent Sunnis out of the Hurriya neighbourhood, which borders Adel, she said Shi’ites had no time to sift the innocent from the guilty because Sunnis were killing Shi’ites.

She says too many Sunnis will never accept Shi’ite rule. They even refuse to accept responsibility for the sins of Saddam or today’s extremists.

“The Sunnis never felt how much we suffered,” she said.

Sunnis say they, too, were victims of Saddam’s tyranny and are even now being pummelled by Shi’ite death squads or American soldiers. Asmaa al-Dulaimi, a member of parliament and the daughter of Adnan al-Dulaimi, who leads the main Sunni bloc, said al-Musawi and her Shi’ite colleagues exaggerated their own victimhood for political gain.

“All of these claims are part of the fake oppression they pretend they endured,” she said.

Statements like these leave al-Musawi seething.

“I can’t stand seeing them controlling things again,” she said. “I can’t stand seeing them in power.”