By Corey Levine
Iraq has long been vaunted as one of the most multi-confessional countries in the world. A dizzying array of groups have co-habited the land for several thousand years: Sunni Arabs; Shia Arabs; Sunni, Shia and Christian Kurds, Muslim Turkmen; Zoroastrians, Jews; Armenian and Assyrian Orthodox Christians; Syrian and Chaldean Catholic Christians. The Iraqi Christians share a common language, Syriac, a modern derivative of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. The Mandaeans, another religious group altogether, revere John the Baptist but are not Christians and have their own holy scriptures.
A group known as Yazidis, practise a religion so secretive and obscure that no outsider knows what it actually is, although it is generally recognized to combine elements of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Islam. Yazidis are often wrongly mistaken for devil worshipers because a demon character plays a central role in their religion.
Although the Yazidis, who are found only in northern Iraq, speak Kurmanji (a northern Kurdish language) and many of their cultural practices are observably Kurdish, they are not ethnologically considered Kurds. However, in the sectarian maelstrom that defines current day Iraq, Kurds are arguing for the Yazidis, whose numbers reach approximately a half million, to be recognized ethnically as Kurds, particularly as many Yazidis reside in communities near Mosul, the oil-rich city close to the border of Iraqi Kurdistan.
In a kind of tit-for-tat situation, in the contested city of Kirkuk, on which a referendum will be held next year, the government of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan has been quietly encouraging the migration of Arabs from the oil-rich city through generous relocation allowances and offers of exchanges of land with Kurds living in the south. Although benign compared to what Saddam enforced on the city’s Kurdish population in the 1980’s of murder, mayhem and forced expulsion in an attempt to ‘Arabize’ the city; an exodus is an exodus, is an exodus, particularly when the potentials spoils offers as great a reward as one of the prime oil fields in the world’s second largest oil producing country.
In other places in Iraq, particularly Baghdad, the sectarian violence is also leaving its mark on the demographics of the country in terms of shifting populations. I am reminded of Bosnia at the height of the war there when previously ethnically mixed communities became mono-ethnic entities either due to forced expulsion or the sense that it was much safer to be with ‘your own kind’.
With similar patterns of ‘ethnic cleansing’, Iraq is quickly becoming the country with the largest number of internally displaced. According the UN agency responsible for refugees, the total number of internally displaced people in the country is inching toward the two million mark.
Over the past year, many of my Iraqi colleagues in Baghdad have had to leave their family home and find alternative accommodation. Some have left because their neighbourhood is considered too ‘hot’ – a place where there is a lot of insurgent activity; others have left because they found themselves on the wrong sectarian divide of their shifting community.
One of my colleagues had to leave because although he had the ‘right’ religious affiliation for his neighbourhood, he was known for having worked for coalition forces when Iraq was officially run by the Americans. As such, this makes him a rich target for the militia controlling his district.
My workplace provided a microcosm in which to watch the unfolding calamity that is current day Iraq. Although my organization had a wealth of diversity, employing Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Mandaeans, as well as the various Christian groups, the insidiousness of the sectarian violence outside of concrete fortress began to infect inside the organisation as well. Behind the bonhomie at work, colleagues were afraid to tell each other in which neighbourhood they lived in case their fellow workers had connections to one or another of the militias that percolate throughout the city.
War survives because of mistrust of the ‘other’. The insurgency in Iraq is succeeding because the militants know how to sow the seeds of fear in the various religious and ethnic communities that make up Iraq. Their campaign to spread hatred and distrust across the sectarian divide is bearing the fruits of its labour.
As a seasoned observer succinctly put it speaking of another conflict but that which could easily be applied to Iraq, “there are few places in the world so riddled with factionalism, so polarized by history and politics and so gripped by tragedy”.
(Corey Levine is a consultant on peace building and human rights in conflict areas. She has worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Palestine and Afghanistan. She can be reached at [email protected])