Domestic Political Chaos Is Not the Only Thing Happening in Iraq

It appears that calm has returned to Iraq after the reported intervention of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s chief and widely respected Shia cleric. In recent weeks, violence had occurred in and near parliament, which has been unable to implement last October’s election results. The clashes involved demonstrators and armed forces loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leading candidate in the elections, and militias loyal to a loose array of rival Shia political parties calling themselves the Coordination Framework.

Al-Sadr withdrew his members from parliament in June and has announced his own retirement from politics (not for the first time). He wants new elections, which he thinks he will win. The Coordination Framework, whose leadership includes al-Sadr’s archrival, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has occupied more than half of Sadr’s seats based on the election results and has proposed a new prime minister. Maliki doesn’t want new elections.

Violence is a staple of Iraqi politics, but it is often intra-sectarian rather than inter-sectarian violence. Shia, Kurds, and Sunnis have all suffered bouts of intra-sectarian political rivalry settled in part through force of arms. The main stakes are power and money. There is often little religious or ideological difference, though al-Sadr claims a more Iraqi nationalist stance while al-Maliki and a number of his Coordination Framework allies are viewed as more pro-Iranian. The Americans are a distant factor, important for the training of the most professional Iraqi security forces but no longer as strongly engaged in Iraqi politics as once they were. Anxious to avoid state collapse in Iraq, they are now reduced to calling for dialogue. Neither al-Sadr, whose forces resisted the Americans for years, nor al-Maliki, who had crucial American support for his second term as prime minister, has much good to say about the Americans.

How this latest deadly violence will play out is not yet clear. New elections are unlikely in the near term, if only because last October’s elections were held early in response to widespread demonstrations and solved nothing. In the past, the winning formula has been a broad coalition, leaving few if any politicians to oppose it. But that is precisely what al-Sadr does not want. He tried but failed to form a “majoritarian” government with Sunni and Kurdish parties, which would have left the Coordination Framework in opposition. The situation could still worsen, with new violence erupting among the competing political factions.

Meanwhile, Iraq muddles on. In June, oil production reached more than 4.5 million barrels per day[i]—near 2016’s record high of 4.83 million barrels per day. At about $90 per barrel, this level of production more than meets the government’s financial obligations and provides ample opportunity not only for investment but also for patronage and corruption. The Federal Supreme Court has decided that Baghdad, not Erbil, should control oil and gas production in Iraqi Kurdistan, causing the exit of international companies that had been active there.[ii] The country’s credit ratings are low but stable. ISIS is mainly defeated and holds no territory, but thousands of its fighters are still at large and hundreds of their families are still returning from Syria. More than one million people displaced by the war against ISIS and earlier conflicts still need support as well as resettlement or reintegration. Government services, which include water, electricity, and healthcare, are notoriously inadequate and inefficient.

Internationally, Iraq has been playing an important role in mediating between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which broke diplomatic ties in 2016. Baghdad has hosted five rounds of talks between Saudi and Iranian intelligence and security officials in the past year and a half.[iii] A meeting of the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers has been announced, but the meeting itself has been delayed, apparently due to Iraq’s political turmoil. Since it won’t do to have rioting during a key diplomatic event, both the Saudis and the Iranians may want to wait for the formation of a new Iraqi government or meet elsewhere.

Iraq faces other problems with its neighbors. Turkey has thousands of troops inside Iraq and bombards Kurdish forces that it considers terrorists in Iraqi Kurdistan. Fighting inside Syria continues to incentivize the smuggling of arms, drugs, fighters, and civilians to and from Iraq. While Iraq controls the vast majority of its own territory, its borders are still porous and its capacity to control them is limited. That is true also for Iraq’s long borders with Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Taking the long view, Iraq is still far better off than it has been for much of the past twenty years. People can go about their daily lives with far fewer impediments than in the days of blast walls around neighborhoods and checkpoints every few hundred meters. Many Iraqis have been sweltering this summer, but electricity supplies have held up better than usual. Multiple political parties compete for votes, even if the media environment is not really free because of political party domination and intimidation. Iraq is back as a player in the region, albeit still a relatively weak one.

While they are unusual in Middle Eastern autocracies, political fights over government formation are the rule in parliamentary systems, not the exception. Iraqis are contending with the difficulty of finding sustainable compromises and the propensity to use organized political violence to achieve desired ends. The divisibility of the financial spoils should make compromise possible, but profound fractiousness and intense rivalry render it difficult.