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Myriam Benraad
With impressive speed, the group has succeeded in transcending its original base to
export itself across borders.
In its wake, Daesh has also triggered an unprecedented sequence of instability in
the region, where the colliding trajectory of Sunni Arabs, faced with the irrepressible
rise of Iran and Shia forces, has yet to see its final outcome. In Iraq, Sunni Arabs have
been relegated to the background of a political transition more widely condemned by
the Iraqis. They desperately sought ways to avert their fate and eventually inducted
Islamic State as an instrument of collective revenge. In addition to their fight against
the United States, deliberately re-attracted to Iraqi soil, the jihadists have placed in the
foreground of their armed struggle the Shia and Iran, considered “disbelievers” and
equally responsible for the status of pariahs that Sunni Arabs have been confined to.
Regional powers, in turn, are divided in the face of this “Frankenstein”, which they have
sometimes directly helped to create and which is now catching up with them. For Daesh
is also the monstrous infant of the wars that neighbouring states of Iraq and Syria have
waged for several years, one that has brought together the disaffected, marginalised and
dispossessed of all stripes.
Without a detailed and documented analysis of the phenomenon unfolding before
our very eyes, of its complexity and of the tangled web of responsibilities, connivance and
calculations it covers, no way out of the crisis can reasonably be envisaged. If the answer is
necessarily global, it will above all depend on the normalisation, or at least the evolution,
of the situation of Sunni Arabs in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.
Deep Sunni Arab resentment
Since 2003, the question of Sunni Arab participation has never ceased to poison the entire
transition in Iraq. From the beginning of the occupation, because of the choice made by US
civil administrator Paul Bremer to proceed with the blind dismantling of the Iraqi army and
the dissolution of the Baath party, many Sunni Arabs found themselves excluded from Iraqi
political life and institutions without any hope of a turnaround. In 2015, the effects of their
stigmatisation and marginalisation have become nearly insurmountable. Nevertheless, to
guarantee genuine political change in Baghdad, Washington deemed it necessary to transfer
power from this “dominant minority” (20 to 30 per cent of the population) to the Shia and
Kurdish “dominated majority”. De-Baathification, largely copied on the denazification of
Germany in 1945, was emblematic of this desire to build a wholly new order, but immediately
assimilated by its targets to the “de-Sunnification” of Iraq. Indeed, these measures reduced
Sunni Arabs to an inferior status, coupled with military operations of rare intensity in all
Sunni Arab regions (including those that were not directly related to the Baath party) that
laid the groundwork for the ultimate disaster named Daesh.
Ten years before the jihadist assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city known for
its religious conservatism, the two battles of Fallujah, in the western sanctuary of the
insurgency, led to a massive Sunni Arab electoral boycott. Any participation was then seen as
legitimising not only foreign occupation but also its partners, referred to as “collaborators”.
In January 2005, the first elections were thus marked by widespread abstention from voting