Iraq: Remedy and Disease

The conflict buzzes around Obama, like a pest he can’t get rid of.

When you can’t tell if purging has eradicated an evil or, in fact, aggravated it, no decision is easy. Nevertheless, at least on this occasion, the crisis hasn’t appeared to make President Obama sweat. Since Friday, the United States has carried out an aerial bombing campaign over Islamic State group strongholds in northern Iraq, where a group of fundamentalist Sunnis — now a proclaimed nation — has swept through towns inhabited by religious and ethnic minorities, leaving a major humanitarian crisis in its wake.

According to the European and American press, there are already more than 150,000 displaced civilians in northern Iraq, among them Christians, Yazidis and Turkmen, who now seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan as the last frontier in the face of advancing jihadi forces. But the Kurdish Peshmerga has lost ground to the Islamic State group in several northeastern parts of the country and has pulled back toward the areas under control of the regional Kurdish government, which has also begun to shake.

It was in the presence of this situation on Thursday that Obama decided to launch aerial attacks over the zone to support the Kurdish resistance, in what seems to open a new chapter in the conflict which he opposed during the presidency of George W. Bush, against which he made his political career, and to which he promised to mark an end, as he indeed did with the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in December 2011.

Now the war returns, as an inevitable consequence of having overthrown Saddam Hussein, who kept sectarianism at bay with an iron fist, the lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq and having left a Shiite government with a sectarian bent installed in Baghdad.

In fact, the Sunni fundamentalists of the Islamic State group were born as a radical group in 2006 in Iraq, under the umbrella of al-Qaida and with the sole objective of fighting the U.S. occupation. Soon after, they began to grow in Syria, battling the secular Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, where today the rebels continue to control some southern areas. By then, they had already broken ties with al-Qaida. And later, stronger and better equipped, they decided to return to Iraq to conquer it and form a caliphate with the lands they also control in Syria.

The result has been an infernal chaos, with villages in disorder, as well as executions and persecutions of unbelievers, as Iraq hasn’t seen since the Golden Horde in the 13th century. It is estimated that since last month, there have been around 500 Yazidis assassinated; the refugees, among them Yazidis and Christians, now number more than 150,000.

Islamic State troops have been particularly cruel to the Yazidi population, considering them to be devil worshipers. Such is the conception that these jihadis have of the predominantly Kurdish people who have inhabited Mesopotamia for centuries, and whose religious worship is formed by a syncretism among Mazdaism (the old faith of the Persian prophet Zoroastro or Zarathrustra), Christianity and Islam. It is due to this syncretism — namely, the fact that the Yazidis do not practice an Abrahamic religion, such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism — that the jihadis associate them directly with Satan; no truce or compromise can save these poor people.

The Islamic State group has devastated the Yazidis. And if the displaced Christians have managed to find a relatively safe route to Kurdistan, the Yazidis haven’t have the same luck; they have been forced to flee to the mountains, where they struggle to survive on scarce food and water supplies.

According to the latest reports of the international press, in two days, the bombings ordered by Obama have managed to recuperate two small towns for the Kurds, Makmur and Gweir, that had been taken by the jihadis. But this isn’t much compared to the vast areas the rebels still control. And in any case, on the ground, the United States only has the support of the Peshmerga, since the Iraqi Army is focused on defending Baghdad, after having been decimated in a matter of hours in the north and other zones of the country when the Islamic State group stormed them in the middle of June.

At this moment, the outlook doesn’t look very favorable for the U.S. military intervention; in fact, it appears that it will only contribute more force to the prevailing chaos and destruction of the region instead of accomplishing its objective. Worse still, this intervention could even push jihadis from other radical groups in the Arab world to join the ranks of the Islamic State. In fact, the Washington Post informed that, according to intelligence sources, various groups of combatants are abandoning their al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen and other countries in Africa in order to integrate into the Islamic State group in Iraq.

In Washington, the Iraq war was declared victorious on various occasions; for example, even before it began, when then-vice president Dick Cheney commented that it would be a “walk in the park” for the United States.* And then again with Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” announcement, in his speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

Ten years later and more than two after the definitive withdrawal of the United States, all the declarations of victory have been proven false. That’s because in war, victory doesn’t appear spontaneously after the military defeat of the enemy. In war, says the German military theorist Clausewitz, the real victory is the creation of a better reality.

Until now, what the United States appears to have created in Iraq is an objectively worse reality. It looks formidable, but let’s hope that the winds will change and this remedy will turn out better than the disease, which, like a leper, appears to devour the Iraqi social fabric bit by bit.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.