Analysis: Shiism's Waxing Crescent
Council on Foreign Relations
June 15, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner
Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a Jordanian jihadi, fresh from fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan, entered the Kurdish no-fly zone in northern Iraq. At the time of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's arrival, Shiite-Sunni relations in the region—explained in this new Backgrounder—were relatively undisturbed. Intermarriage was not uncommon among urban Arabs. Sectarian violence was isolated. If anything, pan-Arabism appeared on the rise, not Shiism.
Five years later, Iraq has become the center of a Sunni-Shiite divide, thanks largely to the thousands slaughtered—many of them Shiites—by Zarqawi's band of extremists. But Zarqawi was not solely responsible for the rift in Shiite-Sunni relations. Another crucial factor, however counterintuitive, is democracy. "Participatory politics drive people to look for new identities," CFR Adjunct Fellow Noah Feldman said at a June 5 symposium on Shiism. "There are identity entrepreneurs out there who present themselves and say: Here's an identity, latch on to this one." Nowhere is this ethno-religious identity split more pervasive than in Iraq, says Phebe Marr of the United States Institute of Peace. "Political leaders played on ethnic and sectarian identities to get elected," she told CFR.org's Bernard Gwertzman.
The result has been a sharply divided Iraqi government, a sectarian conflict teetering on the brink of a civil war, and mounting pressure for Iraq to splinter into three separate states drawn around ethnic and sectarian identities.
Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.
Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.
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