The fighting has finally stopped in Ramadi, a major city in the Sunni heartland. The Islamic State group (IS) has been ousted, and the Iraqi flag is flying once again.
However, Iraq’s government defeated IS only with the help of Sunni tribes, which soothed local distrust of the Shiite-led central government. Now, as Iraq faces the even greater challenge of routing the militants from other cities, it is confronted with a heated conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia that threatens to inflame sectarian tensions across the entire region.
For Iraq, which barely survived years of sectarian civil war, the hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia could once again foil Sunni-Shiite cooperation — and empower the IS, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Photo: AFP
“For sure, the rise in sectarian tensions creates a fertile environment for the growth of ISIS,” Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister, said on Tuesday. “All of this helps ISIS in building its fighting forces and getting support.”
When the Sunni monarchy in Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric along with 46 other prisoners on Saturday last week, it incited the outrage of Iran, a majority Shiite theocracy. An Iranian mob ransacked and burned the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and Saudi Arabia responded by severing diplomatic ties with Iran. Several of Saudi Arabia’s allies quickly followed suit.
Now there are fears the bad blood will sabotage the fledgling efforts to ease the many crises roiling the region, including the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
“I normally try to play down difficulty, but this is a huge setback,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said on Tuesday. “It’s a combination of regional geopolitical consequences and the fact that the sectarian element is playing such a role. Emotions are running so high.”
Iraq, in particular, finds itself in a difficult position, with a central government aligned with the US and Iran.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has tread carefully, cautiously condemning the execution, but not heeding calls from Shiite protesters to cut diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia.
Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Ibrahim al-Jaafari yesterday traveled to Tehran to meet with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammed Javad Zarif and later announced that Iraq would mediate to try to resolve the Iran-Saudi Arabia row.
Zarif said Saudi Arabia was fueling tension in the region while Tehran was trying to defuse it.
“Creating tension is not a sign of power, but weakness,” he said.
Still, analysts, Iraqi politicians and tribal leaders said that so far, there was no indication that the regional tensions were having an immediate impact inside Iraq.
They said that al-Abadi had managed to navigate a middle ground, in part because Iraq’s Sunni leaders are not as closely tied to Saudi Arabia as in many other countries in the region.
“The problem between Iran and Saudi will not affect us,” said Rafi al-Issawi, a tribal leader in Anbar who supports the government operations against the Islamic State.
“We have given tens of martyrs not for Iran or Saudi, but for our country, for the city of Ramadi,” he said. “Let us liberate our country from ISIS, better than Saudi and Iran.”
Iraq had been making progress in mending relations with Persian Gulf neighbors after they were soured by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Additional reporting by Reuters
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema