A suicide car bombing killed seven people outside Iraq’s interior ministry Monday, the latest in a string of deadly attacks in the past week that suggest the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country will trigger a round of sectarian violence that could lead to civil war, analysts said. Iran has moved quickly into the vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal, pushing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a member of the Shia majority, to isolate Iraq’s Sunni minority, experts said. The arrest warrant issued by Maliki’s government for Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, accused of domestic terrorism, was a clear signal that the nation remains irreconcilably split along religious lines. Neighboring countries have been quick to exploit that divide.
“Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Sunni Islamist groups have been waging a covert shadow war to contain Iranian influence in Iraq and build up Sunni Iraqi forces,” said James Phillips, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “Maliki is gambling that by moving fast he can cement his domination of Iraqi politics and marginalize Sunni moderate leaders. As Sunnis push back he is likely to become more dependent on Iran, which is the big winner from continuing turmoil in Iraq.”
About 80 people have been killed and hundreds injured in bombing inside Iraq since Thursday, bloodshed comparable to the violence in 2006 and 2007 after the Sunni mosque in Samarra and the Shia Al-Askari Mosque were bombed.
The violence comes as no surprise to senior U.S. officials, according to one official who asked not to be named.
“Over the past year as the U.S. prepared for withdrawal, the intelligence community has examined the range of potential for political problems in Iraq, especially the fault lines between Sunni and Shia and between Arabs and Kurds and the potential for instability,” the U.S. official.
While Iran has influence with the Shia majority in Iraq, the Maliki government will be careful to keep Tehran at arms-length, the U.S. intelligence community believes.
“The Iraqi people are proud of their nation,” the U.S. official said. “If the Iranians believe they can just step in and try to manipulate people, they’re in for a rude awakening.”
But that view may be optimistic, according to some analysts. The Iraqi leadership has nervously watched the Arab Spring turmoil, while weighing the inevitable destabilizing effect of the American troop withdrawal. That combination of factors may have convinced Iraq’s Shia leaders to seek a closer consolidation with Iran and to move quickly to stamp out any sign of Sunni dissent.
“I think Maliki wasted no time after the last American military unit withdrew to consolidate his power and strike at his Sunni political rivals,” Phillips said. “He may have been encouraged by Iran to take action…total U.S. withdrawal undermined the power and effectiveness of Iraqi security forces by depriving them of previous levels of logistical, intelligence, special-forces and air support.”
Maliki “may have been spurred by the coming fall of the Assad regime in Syria, which will strengthen Sunni Arab forces” that he believes will align themselves with Sunni Arab opposition in Iraq, Phillips said. “[Maliki] probably figured it would be safer to attack them before they gained Syrian support.”
The arrest warrant issued for Hashimi was a sobering signal to Iraq watchers.
Hashimi, who is believed to be hiding in northern Iraq under the protection of Kurdish forces, denied all allegations against him in a televised news conference last week and told another news agency that he now supports dividing Iraq into Sunni, Kurdistan and Shiite nations.
A U.S. military official, who served in Iraq off and on for seven years, said that dividing the nation would not be so simple because of the disparity of the natural resources in the three traditional tribal areas.
“It surprises me that the Sunni’s are pushing for this,” the official said. “The Kurdish tribes control much of the oil region, Shiite tribal areas have oil and fertile farm lands, while the traditional Sunni area is the western desert, with few to little natural resources.”
One result of the growing sectarian tensions has been to spur Sunnis in Iraq and the region to cement alliances wherever they can, including with the Kurds in northern Iraq. That could create an effective counterweight to Iranian influence, officials said. “The fact that Hashimi is taking refuge in Kurdistan may neutralize the potential for conflict between the Sunnis and Kurds,” one U.S. official said. “That serves to weaken Iran’s ability to exert influence over the [Iraq] government.”
Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner’s national security correspondent. She can be reached at [email protected].
