Iraq’s leading Shia cleric urges citizens to take up arms against Sunni militants

Iraq’s top Shia cleric yesterday exhorted all able-bodied Iraqis to take up arms

to combat the marauding Sunni extremist militants who seized broad stretches of the country this week and are threatening the wobbly Shia-led central government in Baghdad.

The call to arms by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al- Sistani was the most urgent sign yet of the growing desperation of the country's Shia majority in the face of a resurgent Sunni militant movement drawn from the insurgency in neighbouring Syria and vestiges of the Saddam Hussein loyalists toppled from power by the US-led invasion a decade ago.

Ayatollah al-Sistani’s plea came as both the United States and Iran, adversaries on a range of issues including the Syria conflict, were both seeking to help the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki and avoid a collapse in Iraq that would further destabilise the Middle East.

At the same time, the ayatollah’s plea risked plunging Iraq further into the pattern of sectarian bloodletting between Sunnis and Shias that convulsed the country during the height of the US occupation.

Enormous weight

Thousands of Iraqi Shias responded to the call by the ayatollah, whose statements carry enormous weight among not just the Shia majority but members of other groups, including some Sunnis.

The statement, read by his representative during Friday prayers, said it was “the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to hold it to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites”.

The representative of Ayatollah al-Sistani, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi al-Karbalaie, spoke in Karbala, regarded by Shias as one of Iraq’s holiest cities. The sheikh said volunteers “must fill the gaps within the security forces”, but cautioned they should not do any more than that.

Armed response

The statement stopped short of calling for a general armed response to the incursion led by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), also known as the the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a Sunni extremist group that has emerged as one of the most potent opposition forces in the Syrian civil war and that now controls large areas of both Syria and northern Iraq.

The sheikh emphasised that all Iraqis should join the fight, pulling together, so the country does not slide into all-out sectarian warfare. But in a time of mounting frictions and deepening distrust between the sects, it appeared unlikely that many Sunnis would answer the ayatollah’s call. Many Sunnis feel little sympathy either for the government or for the Isis extremists.

Volunteers

Volunteers began to appear at the southern gate to Baghdad, which leads to the predominantly Shia south of the country, within an hour of Sheikh Karbalaie broadcast of Ayatollah Sistani’s call. At the police post there, by the soaring arches that mark the city limits, a pickup truck driven by elders pulled up with six young men in the back. “We heard Ali Sistani’s call for jihad, so we’re coming here to fight the terrorism everywhere, not just in Iraq,” said Ali Mohsin Alwan al-Amiri, one of the elders.

The Sunni insurgents continued their offensive yesterday, fanning out to the east of the Tigris River, and at least temporarily seized two towns near the Iranian border, Sadiyah and Jalawla. Security officials in Baghdad said government troops, backed by Kurdish forces, counterattacked several hours later and forced the insurgents to withdraw, a rare success.

The Kurds control a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq and have long sought independence. As the militants advanced on Thursday, their forces took full control of Kirkuk, an oil centre that had been contested by the Kurds and the country’s Arab leaders for years, after the Iraqi army abandoned its posts there.

Disintegration

The apparent disintegration of some units of the US-armed Iraqi army and the loss of control of Kirkuk and the Sunni areas overrun by the militants represents the worst security crisis in Iraq since the US withdrawal in 2011, threatening the country’s future as a cohesive state.

Both the US and Iran have watched events with alarm and have issued warnings of possible interventions.

On the main axis of the insurgent advance, the highway running south from Mosul to the capital, there were no indications yesterday that the militants had succeeded in taking Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, which is home to a Shia shrine and is defended by Shia militias.

Iran’s state-run news media reported this week that Tehran had strengthened its forces along the Iraq border and suspended all pilgrim visas into Iraq, but had received no request from Iraq for military help.

Reports that Iranian Revolutionary Guards had crossed the border into Iraq to assist the government forces could not be confirmed; Shia militia leaders in the capital said they knew of no such move and had not asked Iran to send troops.

The insurgents have pledged to march on Baghdad, but seizing and controlling the sprawling Iraqi capital, with its large population of Shias, is likely to prove much more difficult than advancing across a Sunni heartland with little sympathy for the central government. – (New York Times service)