While the world worries about the growing power of Islamic State militants, some Iraqi lawmakers and residents allege Shiite militias linked to the Baghdad government are attacking Sunni civilians, driving thousands from their homes and raising the risk of renewed civil war.
They say tens of thousands of Sunnis across central Iraq are being targeted, their homes looted, which is pushing more Sunnis into the arms of the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
“There is gross and widespread sectarian cleansing,” Iraqi Vice President Ayad Allawi said by e-mail while traveling in Amman, referring to the areas controlled by Shiite militias that the government has turned to for its defense from Islamic State militants.
Photo: AFP
‘ETHNIC CLEANSING’
Allawi said he had been approached by victims and taken their concerns to the government.
The risk is growing that Iraq — OPEC’s second-biggest producer — will fragment along sectarian lines, undermining the authority of US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and reigniting the country’s recent civil war, according to Wathiq al-Hashimi, a political analyst in Baghdad.
“The government turned to militias to defend Baghdad, but now they’ve lost control of them,” al-Hashimi said. “The use of ethnic cleansing by militias is destroying what belief Sunnis had in piecing the country back together.”
A former senior US commander in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the militias that are conducting sectarian displacement of Sunnis pose an even bigger long-term threat to Iraq than the Islamic State group.
Human Rights Watch last week published a report in which it said government security forces and pro-government militias were attacking civilians in Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite areas.
Rafid Jaboori, a spokesman for al-Abadi, said he could not comment on specific cases, but any such abuse ran against government efforts to build a unified Iraq.
Naim al-Aboudi, a spokesman for one of the largest Shiite militias, denied the accusations of sectarian cleansing.
“Daesh is forcing people out of their homes — not the Shiite forces,” al-Aboudi said by telephone, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
The militant group is accused of killings thousands of Shiites, Yezidis and Christians.
Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq’s 33 million people. They split early in the history of Islam from rival Sunnis over the rightful successor to the Prophet Mohammed. Shiites were persecuted by the Sunni-dominated regime of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
The UN Assistance Mission in Iraq is aware of alleged killings committed by Shiite militias and has requested the government open an investigation, the mission’s spokeswoman, Eliana Nabaa, said by telephone from Baghdad.
Residents of the al-Qatul neighborhood in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, said that after a voice from a loudspeaker demanded they abandon their homes, all did so over the following 72 hours. Shiite militiamen now occupy their homes, they said.
A similar call went out in the Albu-Abbas neighborhood and it too is empty of its Sunni residents.
The accounts were offered in a series of phone interviews over several weeks. Residents asked not to be named to protect their identities.
FORCED TO FLEE
Since November last year, residents and others say about 11,000 Sunni families have been forced from those districts near a Shiite shrine in the town.
Hundreds of men from the area have been detained, said one official, who asked not to be identified.
About 26,000 residents have fled Samarra and registered as displaced persons in temporary accommodation as a result of the violence since June, the International Organization for Migration said.
Al-Abadi’s predecessor, former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-
Maliki, recruited thousands of volunteer fighters after Islamic State fighters crushed his military to seize Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city, in June last year.
Sunni leaders and political analysts warned at the time that the move risked reigniting the sectarian war that flared after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Al-Abadi succeeded al-Maliki in September last year, promising to form a more inclusive government. After almost six months in power, the Shiite politician is still struggling to fulfill pledges to incorporate armed militiamen under a government structure, a step that the US sees as essential to allay the fears of the country’s Sunni minority.
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