Then, last Thursday, on a day like so many in Baghdad, two mortars and a car bomb ripped through an apartment building and crowded marketplace in Kerrada, a largely Shia neighborhood, killing 32 and wounding 150 more. Enraged residents screamed, spitting and shoving at the Iraqi police who, as is so often the case, had failed to prevent the attack. So it goes in Iraq: car bomb, death squad raid, suicide bomb, rocket attack—the litany of sectarian violence has become so familiar and so gruesome that often the most egregious acts of Iraqi bloodshed barely merit more than two lines at the bottom of a wire service story. Americans have been dulled into apathy, if not near total incomprehension, by the scope of the brutality.
And yet the question persists: Is Iraq in a civil war? And if so, how, exactly, do you measure a civil war?
Iraqis have never before in their modern history been embroiled in a civil war. If they believe they are in the midst of one now, why shouldn’t the rest of us believe them? Across the country, Shiites and Sunnis have abandoned what for decades have been mixed neighborhoods and retreated into ethnically pure enclaves. They are protected by militias like Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army whose very claim to legitimacy can be found in its pledge to protect the believers of the “true faith” against the apostates of the other group. Shiites and Sunnis have had grievances dating back over 1,400 years. But in Iraq, Saddam Hussein buried those grievances in his death grip on society. The last three years of mounting violence, however, have served as a slow release valve allowing those feelings of injustice, and the accompanying desire for revenge, to resurface with full force.
And it is indeed the idea of vengeance that both sides of Iraq’s civil war most fervently have at the top of their list. “People in Sadr City nowadays are encouraging each other to carry weapons and be ready to launch war on the Sunnis,” says one 34-year-old electronics shop owner who asks that his full name not be used for fear of his life, “They think it is time to get revenge from those who killed Imam Hussein [in A.D. 680] and took the leadership from him and from his progeny.” The shop owner continues, “Almost all young men in the city are talking about the fight with Sunnis, they gather weapons and ammunition.” At night, he says, cars full of young men, members of the Mahdi Army, gather in the streets chanting pro-Sadr slogans and head out into the city on missions.
One Mahdi Army commander is unequivocal about his aims: “Our holy and great scholars were always subject to the injustice of the Sunni caliphs, so it is our duty to get rid of their successors,” says Ali Mijbil, 26, a mechanic, “We’ve been waiting for this moment since we were children. It is our grandfather’s hope. The Wahhabis, the Baathists and the Sunnis in general are all infidels and deserve being killed.” Despite recent efforts to crack down on security, the Iraqi government is simply no longer able to keep those forces in check. “Sunnis and Shiites look at each other with hostile views,” says Baghdad-based political analyst Aziz Jabur, “They are returning behind their own lines, their own history, their own religion. It’s now a civil war. The reality is there.”
By most benchmarks, as one well-briefed Western analyst in Baghdad tells me, Iraq slipped into civil war “a long time ago.” Some observers insist that the scope of the violence hasn’t reached critical levels yet. U.S. and military officials in Baghdad admit that “tit-for-tat killings” are occurring, but on a limited scale. But what is “limited” about an estimated 6,000 civilians killed in May and June alone, according to a recent United Nations report on Iraq’s violence? Or that some 27,000 Iraqi families had registered for relocation since February, according to reports from the Ministry of Displacement and Migration?
Bodies have been piling up at the Baghdad morgue at a clip altogether in line with an escalating civil war: 1,068 in January of this year; 1,294 in March; 1,595 in June. Altogether, the U.N report suggests that as many as 14,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the beginning of 2006. The vast majority of those deaths have been the result of “insurgent, militia and terrorist attacks … with an increasing sectarian connotation.” As a point of comparison, in the first years of Lebanon’s civil war, when 1,000 dead per month made headlines, most people believed the conflict would be resolved quickly. But two years later, at the end of 1976, 35,000 people had died and everyone recognized that civil war was in full swing.
Politicians have artfully dodged the civil war question with fanciful language, calling it “sectarian conflict” or “civil strife.” One senior Iraqi official went so far as to say “the language isn’t important.” Isn’t it? The evasiveness calls to mind the politically correct characterization of the Balkan civil war as a “war of aggression.” Or, more ominously, the shameful refusal on the part of the U.N. and the Western powers to recognize the Rwandan genocide for what it was. Only after the Hutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes did it become politically acceptable to begin using the term genocide. Civil wars don’t just start in one day.
To be sure, it would be wrong to say that all of Iraq is at war. The Kurdish north is, at least for the moment, quiet and relatively stable, a world apart from the chaos of Baghdad. Similarly, much of the south is spared the ethnic hatreds and tensions of Baghdad. The Iraqi Army even took full control of one of the southern provinces recently, a fanfare of celebration for the Shia majority that lives there.
But for months, Sunni families have been fleeing the militia-dominated death squads in the nine Shia provinces of the south, heading north to Baghdad or other friendlier areas, leaving homes and friends behind them. And in the Sunni western desert, Shia are hated even more than the Americans. They are seen as purveyors of an Iranian agenda and accomplices in the despised American occupation. These facts lead to a simple conclusion: where there is even the slightest potential for sectarian conflict in Iraq these days, war on the very fabric of Iraqi civilization erupts.
Most of that takes place in Baghdad, home to 8 million Iraqis of every stripe and creed. Sometimes, there is no need for physical violence; the intimidation is terror enough. A Sunni engineer named Mohammed who lived in the Baghdad neighborhood of Ghaziliya for 20 years recently came home to find a note attached to his front gate. “You infidels and traitors must leave the city within 72 hours, or else,” it read. After a sleepless night, Mohammed found another note the next morning. This time, there was a bullet inside the envelope. “Enemies of Imam Hussein,” it read, “Dirty Sunnis, you must leave. This is our land, and from now on this house is ours. Leave, or you will be slaughtered like dirty dogs.” He left.
Meanwhile, Sunni extremists continue to wreak a devastating toll across the country. Last July 17, dozens of suspected Sunni gunmen stormed a largely Shia market in Mahmoudiya killing more than 50. The very next day, in the Shia stronghold of Kufa, a suicide bomber in a van lured Shia day laborers toward his truck with offers of work before he detonated himself and took 60 more with him. The two-day death toll exceeded 100.
There have been more suicide attacks in Iraq in the last year than there were in all other conflicts on earth in the previous 20 years. “The Sunnis bomb, the Shia send out death squads, every day, every day,” says Sheik Kashif al-Ghita, an independent religious scholar in Baghdad.
Can there be a civil war when the Army hasn’t turned on itself, or the government? It’s a fair question. But Iraq’s nascent military couldn’t turn on itself even if it wanted to. The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, not the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, controls the Iraqi Army—as well as the supply lines, logistical operations, training and supervision and ultimately, its makeup and deployment. The Iraqi Army is unable to operate fully on its own, and therefore unable to splinter or fracture on its own. That is not the case with the police, the Facilities Protection Services, or the various other security forces that operate largely out of sight for ministries and other government patrons. These forces are riddled with infiltrators who answer to militia leaders first. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has admitted that getting rid of the militias is “complicated” because of their spidery reach into nearly every organ of Iraq’s government.
Maliki, on a trip last week to Washington for talks with President Bush, stood in front of the U.S. Congress and told the world that Iraq was not sliding into civil war. But when the signs are there for the entire world to see, isn’t it worse to simply pretend it doesn’t exist?
The Bush administration has spared no measures in showing the world the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s former regime: the torture chambers, the chemical attacks against the Kurds, the mass graves. Saddam Hussein, it is often rightly pointed out, “waged war against his own people.” Today, Saddam is gone but in his place a reign of terror, perpetrated all too often by the Iraqi people, has come in his stead. By any reasonable measure, and in any other part of the world, that would be called a civil war. Why not now?
