Anti-Shiism
in Iraq and beyond
The first celebration of the Muslim holiday
Ashura since the fall of Baghdad has been particularly
bloody for Shiites - and ominous for American foreign
policy. About 140 Iranian and Iraqi Shiite pilgrims died
in suicide bombings in Baghdad and Karbala last week,
and 43 Pakistani Shiites were killed in Quetta, Pakistan.
The attacks bring to light
a grave problem facing America: The Shiite revival in Iraq
since the fall of Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated a Sunni
militancy that in turn threatens peace and stability in a
broad swath of Asia from Pakistan to Lebanon.
American authorities may well be correct
that the bombings were the work of the terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda operatives who see sectarian violence
as the means to subvert American plans for the country. However,
it would be a mistake to view the anti-Shiite violence in Iraq
as the work of a small group of terrorists and limited to Iraqi
politics.
Anti-Shiism is embedded in the ideology
of Sunni militancy that has risen to prominence across the
region in the last decade. Wahhabi Sunnis, who dominate Saudi
Arabia's religious affairs and export their philosophy to its
neighbors, have led the charge, declaring Shiites "infidels" and
hence justifying their murder.
These anti-Shiite beliefs have spread
to South Asia and Afghanistan, where the Taliban government
used them to justify massacres of Shiite civilians. Even with
the fall of the Taliban, widespread killings of Shiites and
bombings of Shiite mosques and community centers in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan have continued.
Many of the Sunni militants responsible
for the attacks were trained in the same camps in Afghanistan
as the Qaeda fighters and the Taliban soldiers. They fought
side by side when the Taliban secured its grip on Afghanistan,
notably the captures of Mazar-i-Sharif and Bamiyan in 1998,
during which at least 2,000 Shiite civilians were murdered.
And Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of planning the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center, is also a prime suspect in the bombing
of the Shiite shrine of Mashad in Iran in 1994.
The point here is that the forces that
are today killing Shiites in Iraq have their roots all over
the region. It is a network of Arabs and non-Arabs, South Asians
and Middle Easterners, Wahhabis and non-Wahhabis. And if these
men succeed in starting a sectarian civil war, it will quickly
spread beyond Iraq's borders.
While Shiites make up only 10 percent
to 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, 120 million
of them live in the Middle East. They are the majority populations
in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran and Iraq, the largest community
in Lebanon, and sizable minorities in various Gulf emirates,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has produced
a Shiite cultural revival there that is shifting the balance
of power between Shiites and Sunnis. Political events have
further angered Sunnis outside Iraq - especially the creation
of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Governing Council and the virtual
veto power over it exercised by the Shiites' religious leader,
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
It is virtually unthinkable to many Sunnis
that one of the most important Arab countries - the seat of
the Abbasid Empire from the 8th to 13th centuries, which established
Sunni supremacy and brutally suppressed Shiites - would pass
from Sunni to Shiite domination. In militant Sunni circles,
it is taken as proof of an American conspiracy against them
and against Islam as a whole. Thus Sunni militancy is not only
inherently anti-Shiite, but anti-American as well.
What America is facing in Iraq is not
just a Qaeda operation against U.S. control, but the vanguard
of a broad movement. It is based on the premise that violence
against Shiites will not only derail Iraq's transition to democracy,
but will also incite Shiite-Sunni violence throughout the Muslim
world.
To contend with Sunni militancy in Iraq,
America must contain it throughout the Middle East and South
Asia. This means putting pressure on countries like Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan to stem the tide of anti-Shiite rhetoric. It also
means ensuring that Iraqi Sunnis do not feel left out of the
emerging democratic Iraq, and working with Sistani to quell
Shiite rage over the attacks. What happened in Karbala must
not become a sign of things to come for the whole region.
Vali Nasr is a professor of national security
affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.
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