Backed by US airstrikes, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shi’ite militias swept into the Turkomen town of Amerli over the weekend, ending the ISIS siege of the town and giving US officials a chance to pat themselves on the back about the “liberation.”
Yet the complex ethnic and religious lines along which Iraq is divided mean that no town can simply be retaken without having huge consequences. Amerli may be “liberated,” but the move puts Sunni Arab villages nearby directly in the crosshairs of the militias the US airstrikes helped enter the area.
That’s not something that should be surprising. Shi’ite militias have been particularly brutal in Sunni neighborhoods they’ve taken closer to Baghdad, believing the locals are pro-ISIS, and with some of these villages formerly used as ISIS staging areas, revenge killings are a real possibility.
That’s been both a primary cause an ongoing problem with this latest Iraqi War, as the pro-government militias, and the Iraqi military itself, have been hostile toward the Sunni Arab minority nationwide, and have responded to the growing unrest among them with violent crackdowns. The vicious cycle continues.
Three-state solution — The only sanity
Since the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, people of Western European blood have always claimed that their forcing different tribes and nations to live together under one rule is to establish permanent peace. For to plunder by confusion be our heart’s desire, bless our darling hearts.
So, let Iran, Russia and China provide a peace keeping force, let Iraq be divided such that the Kurds, Sunnis and Shia tribes rule over the land that they now occupy and let no Western nation try to trade their war materials for Iraq oil.
The author's blame of Shiites for the Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq ignores almost all of that violence since it was triggered by US invasion and occupation in 2003. Before there was any violence by the Shiites, there were at least two years of Sunni attacks on Shiites who were restrained from retaliating by Shia religious leaders. That unilateral Sunni violence period was indeed followed by bilateral violence, which died down two or three years later. Then came further unilateral Sunni attacks on Shiites which have continued until the very recent resumption of Shiite retaliation against Sunnis. Throughout this entire period, there has never been a Shia equivalent to the Sunni Al Qaeda-related terrorist groups utilizing car bombs, IEDs and suicide bomb attacks on civilians of all religious persuasions. Nor has there been deliberate Shia bombings of Sunni religious shrines, as the Sunnis have done since 2003. In sum, there has been Shia violence against Sunnis, but the Sunni on Shia violence has been vastly greater. The author needs to review the history of sectarian violence in Iraq for the past decade and take an honest look at the facts.