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
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS