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“the winds of change that blew into the region this year emanated from Iraq” Khudayer al-Khuza’ie, Dawa Tanzim Party Vice Presisent of Iraq 10 July 2011 |
Iraqi Politics
Prime Ministers | |||
| Iyad Allawi | 01 Jun 2004 | 03 May 2005 | Iraqi National Accord |
| Ibrahim al-Shiqr al-Jaafari | 03 May 2005 | 20 May 2006 | State of Law Coalition |
| Nuri Kamil al-Maliki | 20 May 2006 | 14 Aug 2014 | State of Law Coalition |
| Haider Jawad al-Abadi | 14 Aug 2014 | 08 Sep 2018 | State of Law Coalition |
| Adel Abdul Mahdi | 02 Oct 2018 | 20 Nov 2022 | Shia blocs |
| Mohammad Allawi | 02 Feb 2020 | 02 Mar 2020 | Shia blocs |
| Adnan Zurfi | 17 Feb 2020 | 09 Apr 2020 | |
| Mustafa al-Kadhimi | 09 Apr 2020 | 13 Oct 2022 | |
| Muhammad Shia al-Sudani | 13 Oct 2022 | xx xxx 2026 | Shia blocs |
In 2003 the Shia and Kurdish communities largely welcomed the US invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime. By contrast, the Sunni community viewed it as a disaster because it threatened to undo the privileged position its elite had occupied within the regime. Over the years, these attitudes have shifted, as Iran has come to play a significant role in Iraqi domestic politics. Many of the Shia parties have aligned with Tehran and as its confrontation with the US has intensified, they have also increasingly adopted anti-US stances.
The same process, however, has not been replicated among the Shia population. In fact, there have been increasingly anti-Iranian attitudes among Iraq's Shia. According to the Baghdad-based Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies, 86 percent of Iraqi Shia had a favourable view of Iran in 2014, but just 41 percent did in 2019.
David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post on 09 January 2014 that " ... two points seem clear: First, the Obama administration, in its rush to leave the country, allowed the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to undo many of the gains made against al-Qaeda. Second, Iran has waged a brilliant covert-action campaign that turned Maliki and Iraq into virtual clients of Tehran - and in the process alienated Sunnis and pushed them toward extremism." Ignatius quotes "one former U.S. official" as saying "What is tragic is that Iraq's slide toward an Iranian axis and civil war were not only predictable but indeed predicted by Iraq experts within the U.S. government... Iraq's current meltdown and its grave implications on U.S. national security interests were entirely avoidable."
Ignatius wrote "Maliki's new government has played a particularly vengeful sort of politics. The government reneged on promises to pay the Sunni tribal militia that Gen. David Petraeus mobilized in 2007 and 2008 to battle al-Qaeda in Fallujah and other areas of Anbar province. Many Sunnis, fearing that Maliki's Shiite government was simply a tool of Iran, began turning back toward sectarian warfare."
Since Iraqis have been living in an unstable environment for over 25 years, the situation seemed normal.
Sheikh Nasser Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, former Qatari Ambassador to the UN and to the US, said in June 2014 that "Everybody was expecting something big to happen in Iraq when Maliki came back as Iraqi prime minister four years ago. Instead of really opening up Iraq and making it a model for the religions, Maliki became beholden to the Iranians’ strategic goals in the region, i.e., to dominate the whole Middle East and the Gulf, and he created a sectarian state – as a matter of fact, an Iranian state within Iraq – because even Shi'ite Arabs suffered under him a lot."
2013 was the deadliest year in Iraq since 2008, according to the United Nations, with some 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces killed in unrest. One year after U.S. troops left Iraq, the fragile network of Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds unravelled. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Iraq in late 2012 and early 2013, rallying against the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Many of the Sunni protesters accused their Shi'ite prime minister of marginalizing their sect and consolidating power. Rising anti-government protests, mostly by Sunnis, rocked Iraq since December 2012. Many Sunnis were calling for Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step down. They also wanted the release of detainees they say are being held without trial -- and the suspension of an anti-terrorism law they say targets Sunnis unfairly. Maliki’s Shi'ite supporters also took to the streets, in what was becoming escalating sectarian strife.
Women and girls were at times sexually exploited through so-called temporary marriages, a practice more common in Shia than in Sunni traditions, under which a man gives the family of the girl or woman dowry money in exchange for permission to “marry” her for a specified, limited period. Government officials and international and local NGOs also reported that the traditional practice of “fasliya”--whereby family members, including women and children, are traded to settle tribal disputes--remained a problem, particularly in southern governorates. In May 2015 an agreement to resolve a dispute between the al-Shawi and al-Garamsha tribes in the Qurna area north of Basrah included the exchange of up to 50 women over a one-year period. Local authorities, however, intervened and compelled the sheikhs of the tribes to forswear fasliya, and by year’s end the women had not been exchanged.
An active media expressed a variety of views largely reflecting the owners’ political viewpoints. The media also self-censored to comply with government restrictions against violating public order and because of fear of reprisal, particularly by nongovernmental forces. Media outlets, unable to cover operating costs through advertising revenue, overwhelmingly relied on political funding, which affected their ability to report unbiased news. Political parties strongly influenced, or controlled outright, most of the several hundred daily and weekly print media publications, as well as dozens of radio and television stations.
Since January 2014 the armed conflict displaced more than 3.2 million persons, predominantly in Anbar, Ninewa, and Salah ad Din governorates. An additional one million IDPs from the 2006-08 sectarian conflict remained displaced.
Terrorism and violence left at least 12,282 civilians dead and 23,126 others injured in 2014, making it the deadliest year since the flare-up of sectarian violence in 2006-2007. While civilian fatalities in 2015, including civilian police that the government used in military operations, decreased from 2014, terrorist groups continued to target civilians, police, and security forces. From January 1, 2014, to October 31, 2015, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) recorded at least 55,047 civilian casualties resulting from the conflict, with 18,802 killed and 36,245 wounded. Baghdad was most affected with almost half of the total fatalities.
In the UN mission's estimate, 1,119 Iraqis were killed and 1,561 others wounded in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict across Iraq in March 2016 alone.
The country experienced large-scale protests in Baghdad and several in central and southern provinces beginning in 2019 and lasting through mid-2020, with reports of more than 500 civilians killed and 20,000 or more injured by Iraqi Security Forces and militias. During the year 2022 sporadic protests continued.
The head of Iraq's National Intelligence Service (NIS), Mustafa al-Kadhimi, was tapped on 09 April 2020 to be prime-minister designate,as the country cycles through potential leaders at a politically unstable time. President Barham Salih appointed al-Kadimi shortly after the previous designated prime minister, Adnan al-Zurfi, resigned after failing to secure enough support to pass a government. Zurfi citied "internal and external reasons" for his decision to withdraw. "My decision not to proceed with my nomination is to preserve Iraq and its greatest interests," he said. Al-Kadhimi became the third leader to be nominated as the prime minister deisgnate in just 10 weeks.
Iraqi President Barham Salih appointed Adnan al-Zurfi on 17 March 2020 as the country's new prime minister-designate in the latest bid to resolve a months-long political crisis. Al-Zurfi had 30 days to form his cabinet which he must then put to a vote of confidence in Iraq's fractious Parliament. The 54-year-old former governor of the holy Shia city of Najaf heads the Nasr parliamentary grouping of former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Al-Zurfi would replace caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who quit in December 2019 following widespread mass demonstrations against a government that protesters see as corrupt, failing to provide them with basic services, and beholden to powerful neighbouring Iran. President Salih has made an unprecedented step chosing Adnan al-Zurfi without the consultation of the political parties in Parliament. He was seen as having pretty close ties with the West and with the US specifically and, as a result of that, many of the political parties in Parliament were likely to reject him.
Political factions had intensely debated names for days, seeking a "non-confrontational" figure to preserve the status quo. Al-Zurfi's appointment came two weeks after former Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Allawi withdrew his candidacy for the post, accusing political parties of obstructing him. Al-Zurfi was a former official of the US-run authorities that took over Iraq after the 2003 US invasion that deposed former ruler Saddam Hussein.
The Arabic-translated version of the book “A Century of Bankruptcy from 1921 to the Present.”by the French-Iraqi historian and sociologist Adel Bakwan was published in 2024 by Hachette Antoine/Noufal. The book, which was published in French, was translated into Arabic under the title “Iraq: A Century of Bankruptcy from 1921 to Today.” It documents 100 years of Iraq's modern history, from its founding by King Faisal I, through the monarchy that was overthrown, until the rule of the Baath Party, and up to the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime and Iraq's attempt to establish democratic rule after 2003.
Bakwan believes that the Iraqi entity is still, to this day, “a prey to external interference,” while it is undermined internally by “the interference of the religious establishment, the spread of corruption, the parties’ control over the country’s resources, and the state’s militia.” The translator of the book into Arabic, writer and university professor Wissam Saada, tells “Raise Your Voice,” that “Bakwan raises in his book a basic problem centered around the ability of civil, ethnic, and sectarian groups to have strategies to rule Iraq, and not just reactions that only led to bankruptcy.” At the level of state building.
He points out that "the important aspect of the book is the discussion of party experiences in Iraq and the devoting chapters to them, such as the Baath Party, the Dawa Party, and the Iraqi Communist Party." According to Saadeh, the book attempts to "explain the reasons for the structural failure in Iraq. Bakwan appears emotional in some pages of the book towards the period of Abdul Karim Qasim's rule, as it was the only period in which one of Iraq's rulers attempted to produce a contract between the various fabrics of society despite his authoritarian leaning." This vision conveys to the reader “an emotional feeling towards Abdul Karim Qassem, and a negative feeling towards the Arab nationalists and Baathists,” says Saadeh.
Adel Bakwan said "We must not take the word the word "bankruptcy" in the literal sense, because it was used in this book from beginning to end to express the social, political, economic, and psychological failure of the Iraqi elites, from the founding of the state in 1921 until now, to establish a social contract. It is true that they succeeded in building various systems and institutions, but they did not succeed in establishing a social contract to which they belong. With all the religious, ethnic, sectarian, intellectual and social differences, without the social contract, “bankruptcy” will be the strongest hypothesis that will impose itself on reality....
"When King Faisal came from outside Iraq, he was not an Iraqi, but he was an intellectual who spoke English, French, and Arabic, and he had complete knowledge of the meaning of nation-building and state-building. He wanted to build a modern Iraqi state similar to European countries, but he failed... In the beginning, King Faisal I had a project to build an Iraqi nation, but it failed. Because the social structure of the Iraqi state and Iraqi society, as the British envisioned it, was based on the idea of sectarianism.
"In the beginning, they wanted to build the Iraqi state with the Shiite majority, and when they arrived, Percy Cox believed that the Shiites excluded from power and regime by the Ottomans would be the ones who would help the British in establishing the modern state, but the Shiites organized themselves into a jihadist movement against the new British project in Iraq. The Sunnis, with their pragmatism and culture in managing the state since the time of the Ottomans, understood that the world had changed, the era of the Ottomans had ended, and the British role had come in the Middle East, and they must ally with them. Therefore, when the Shiite alliance to build the state ended, the British directly concluded a contract with the “arrogant minority,” as King Faisal called it, to build the Iraqi state."
Bakwan noted "the “shadow of Saddam Hussein,” which remains embedded in the Shiite perception. The Shiite component has not yet gotten rid of it, and whenever Sunni leaders appear from Tariq al-Hashemi to Muhammad al-Halbousi, the Shiites believe that they will be the unifier or reference for the Sunni component, so they attack him in all forms, with the aim of preventing a comprehensive and symbolic personality appear among the Sunnis.... Sunni society, is a tribal society. Therefore, it is not easy for a Sunni personality to emerge who represents a Sunni symbol and a single Sunni leadership....
"Democracy is not elections but social, political and cultural education. Democracy is a set of intellectual systems and needs generations and generations to be educated on it, but in Iraq, the Americans believed that democracy was nothing but elections, so whenever elections took place in Iraq, we found them and the West talking about the “emerging Iraqi democracy,” and this is a big mistake."
".... there are no component social and political forces in Iraq that believe in democracy, and the democratic culture of the political blocs and parties in Iraq is nothing but management of the balance of power and not a belief in the opposition and the government and the management of differences. In short, we brought democracy to Iraq without having democrats.... Iraq has always been a land for settling scores with major powers and not a homeland with national sovereignty, from the Sassanians until the American occupation."
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