Kurdish Hostility Towards The Shia

Hostile Makeover
by Spencer Ackerman  
TNR Online  Feb 17, 2006

Adel Abdul Mahdi probably thought he did everything right when he walked into the Kurdish parliament building here on January 21. Back then, Mahdi was the odds-on favorite to become Iraq's next prime minister. According to a de facto sectarian apportionment of the highest-ranking governmental positions, the Shia super-bloc known as the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) essentially chooses the prime minister, and Mahdi was the choice of his party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was thought to be the dominant faction within the UIA. He had evidently taken his trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to return a favor: Throughout January, Kurdish notables had suggested to reporters that they would prefer a Mahdi premiership to another term for Ibrahim Jaafari, whom they consider a theocrat and, worse, a weakling. January 21 was the day that the two ruling Kurdish parties formally unveiled an arduously negotiated deal to merge their dual administrations into a single entity. Mahdi wasn't going to miss the ceremony, which was filled with other aspirants to power, like ex-premier Iyad Allawi.

It was smart for Mahdi to kiss the Kurdish ring, as wooing the Kurdistan Alliance is critical for anyone seeking to be part of the new government. But whatever Kurdish goodwill Mahdi possessed wasn't enough to save his candidacy. Earlier this week, followers of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr rallied just enough support for Jaafari to earn him a re-nomination as prime minister, thereby preventing a victory by Sadr's bitter opponents in SCIRI. The Kurds let it be known through the press that they weren't pleased with the Shia's choice--something that appears to be part of a recent trend. Even before Mahdi crashed and burned, the Kurds had been musing aloud that Shia power needs to be curbed. "The Shia may have the majority to elect a prime minister, and have to have their prime minister, but the most important thing is that every faction should have qualified people nominated for the cabinet," Fadhil Merani, the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party's politburo, told me two weeks ago. "Iraq needs a strong prime minister with a clear agenda, to rule Iraq as part of a strong government, not as a religion or a sect."

Merani was being diplomatic, but I heard similar criticism of the Shia expressed a lot more harshly from others. Around Kurdistan there's a surprising amount of outright hostility to the Shia, with whom the Kurds formed the last government. Anti-Shia skepticism runs along a spectrum, stretching from concern that a continued alliance with the Shia hurts Kurdish long-term aspirations for independence on one side to outright racism on the other. Some even intimate that it wouldn't be such an awful thing if the Sunnis--who oppressed the Kurds for generations--returned to power in Baghdad. But while nostalgia for Sunni rule is hardly likely to take hold among the Kurdish mainstream, Shia like Mahdi who look to the Kurdish north for governing partners should probably expect an icier reception than they've gotten in the past.

Casual settings can easily turn into a forum for Shia-bashing. Over dinner with a friend in a swank neighborhood in the Kurdish capital, what started as a routine swap of political gossip quickly descended into an airing of grievances with the Shia. Sadr had recently promised to defend Iran in the event of a U.S. attack. My friend's questioning was plaintive: Didn't the United States understand it was putting Iranian proxies into power? When I responded that the last thing the United States wants is to see Sadr in a position of prominence, he told me rather nonchalantly that he was talking about the Shia in general. My friend--who himself was once extremely close to being taken hostage by Sunni insurgents in Falluja--then launched into a defense of the insurgency, promising that if the United States simply reopened the political process to the old Sunni elite, the Sunnis would first crush any Al Qaeda elements among them "in ten minutes," and then would "sort out" the Iranian agents. When I told him that sounded like throwing the democratic process out the window to the benefit of the Kurds' historic enemies, he shrugged. Before changing the subject, he warned that "the fanatics"--that is, the Shia--would be even worse for both Kurds and Iraqi Arabs.

Ahmed Penjweny has a more strategic focus but expresses much of the same vitriol. Penjweny is a prominent Erbil cleric who, as a member of the upstart Kurdistan Islamic Union party, served as a parliamentarian in Baghdad during the interim assembly and helped draft the Iraqi constitution. He considers the rise of Shia power in Iraq directly threatening to the Kurds, who he thinks are insufficiently aware of the danger. "Our media praises the Shia a lot, because of our mutual opposition to Saddam Hussein," Penjweny lamented to me. "But this is bad. This is the time of ruling and power, not a time to be courteous to the Shia." For Penjweny, Kurdish interests--most importantly, the desire for an independent Kurdish state in the future--can be damaged by an illusory sense of common ground with the Shia, even on issues like federalism, which both fervently champion. "Some Kurdish leaders think federalism for the Shia will be good for the Kurds, but this is wrong," Penjweny argued. "It lessens the specialty of the Kurdish nation. We have our own traditions and our own language. Federalism for the Shia makes the matter of the Kurds trivial on the world stage. If there are three or four regions [in Iraq], it will be a threat to our eventual independence." In a subsequent interview, Penjweny took a much more caustic view: "The Shia are simple and ignorant. They can't rule Iraq. Only the Sunnis can."

The Kurdish leadership doesn't go anywhere near that far. But the UIA's decision to give Jaafari another term was greeted by a sharp warning from Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. Clearly uncomfortable with the theocratic drift of the UIA, Talabani insisted that the Kurds would only take part in a UIA-led coalition government if the UIA included Allawi's secular Iraqi List. Allawi is hated by many in the UIA, who consider him to be a "little Saddam," but Talabani emphasized that "any rejection of the Iraqi List is a rejection of the Kurdish Coalition." Allawi will be a bitter pill for the UIA to swallow, but since the Shia don't have enough seats in parliament to form a government by themselves, it's hard to see how they can avoid his inclusion in the next administration. That would be a big victory for Talabani--and probably not the last time the Kurds attempt to rein in their Shia allies.