Iraq's Shia Led Government Doesn’t Believe in Their Own Constitution!

Iraqi PM Haider Abadi with Shia religious leaders, June 2017. Photo: Courtesy/Iraqi Prime Minister office/pmo iq

Omar Sindi | Exclusive to iKurd.net

The Shia led government in Baghdad believes in a theocratic system, a copy and paste from the Iranian ecclesiocracy system of governing. The Iraqi constitution is based on, including but not limited to, human rights, free speech, individual rights, freedom of association, or a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free, fair elections. Those who say that a united Iraq is important must realize that the people in Iraq were forced together. The Iraqi state was created from the fragment of the Ottoman Empire after its capitulation in World War 1, to serve the interest of the British and French colonial powers, and the colonial politics of the past century shouldn’t be sacred or unchanged.

At the time, the Shia community was against this unilateral decision to bond the diverse people of Mesopotamia together, which was made by the British and French powers. The Kurdish people also vehemently resisted this rudimentary decision of attaching this part of Kurdistan to Iraq. The British Royal Air Force was used against the Kurdish Peoples resistance, which included the use of lethal weapons, and ever since the Kurdish people have been oppressed by numerous regimes in Baghdad, and they have relentlessly tried to unyoke themselves from the tyrannical rule in Baghdad. This perennial cliché of continued agony of Kurdish people must stop at some point!

At the same time, the Iraqi constitution federally recognizes Kurdistan as an autonomous region, including article 140, which is part of the Iraqi constitution that deals with the disputed area of the Arabization policy that took place in Kurdistan under Dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, which intended to change the ethnography and demography of this part of Kurdistan. However, the Shia led government in Baghdad never seriously bothered to resolve this issue which is a part of Iraqi constitution.

Iranian Mullahs consider the Iraqi Shia led government in Baghdad as a long term project of the “Shia Crescent”, which is an area from the mouth of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, the best sign of this is that Tehran Government has supported Assad‘s regime’s since the early 1980’s, during Iran and Iraq war, and they continue to support them in the current ongoing upheaval, the protracted civil war in Syria.

It has been reported by international media outlets that “According to Zohar Mojahe, an Afghani official in Fatimid Brigade, 2,000 Afghan soldiers were killed and 8,000 were wounded in Syria over the past five years.”

Those policy makers in the US and European Union who think they can get Mr. Abadi out of the Iranian orbit and make democratic institution work in Iraq under the prime minister Haider al-Abadi is just like someone who says they are going to build a Taj Mahal on the Moon.

It’s just like the Former US Ambassador Robert S. Ford who relentlessly tried to persuade American and European policy makers to support the Turkish President Erdogan’s policy in Syria which was to train Bashar Assad’s oppositions, like Al-Nusra and others who became Islamic extremists!

During Hassan Rouhani’s presidential election, many observers in the West thought that Hassan Rohani was a moderate, and maybe perhaps was a democratically minded person that we might’ve been able to do business with. But at the same time, perhaps they overlooked that Hassan Rohani is a Guardian Council member, one of those theologians appointed by the Supreme Leader. Since Hasan Rouhani became the president of Iran, what or which policy has President Rouhani able to change? domestically, Iran has one of the worst human rights records in accordance with many international media outlets, and the current Iran’s foreign policy has continued the same adventurisms or interferences as under the rhetoric bellicose of former Iranian President Ahmadi Najadi towards Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and many other places, where it is mostly Shia communities, in other words, there has been no change in Iran’s policy. Basically, sure, if Iranian Mullahs deem that Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi will support their adventurism project such as in Lebanon, in Syria and elsewhere, then they will advise their proxies inside Iraq to support Abadi‘s re-election

“Baghdad Iraq has again, showed reluctance to share the Arab League’s condemnation of what the organization describes as Iranian interventions in regional states affair, and also refused to recognize Lebanese militia Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.” (IraqiNews.com)

Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces is a copy and paste concept of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, which are directed from Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Quds force.

In the beginning of the so-called Iranian revolution, Iranian clerics placed many democratically minded people in charge of government. People like Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, Foreign Minister Dr. Karim Sanjabi, Interior Minister Dariush Forouher and many others. Obviously, because they disagreed with the Mullah’s adventurisms, they were slowly but surely all eliminated one by one.

Upon Dr. Sanjabi’s resignation from his post, he said (paraphrasing) that it was a big mistake in the beginning of uprising of anti-Shah’s regime to have cooperated with the Mullah.

Those who think or consider Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to be a democratically minded person should also maybe consider Iranian President Hasan Rohani, or his predecessor, Ahmadi Najadi democratically minded people too!!!

Turkish President Erdogan and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei don’t need to act like Sultan Salim I and Shah Ismail I to kill or to eliminate those who have dissenting views or different visions, there are the other people in the region have the same rights as they do…

On October 16th, 2017, when Iraqi Forces with the assistance of the Iranian Quds force attacked Kurdish Peshmerga positions in Kirkuk and the other areas in Kurdistan, many Shia led government officials in Baghdad, including parliamentarian members, called for the desolation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They disregarded the fact that Kurdistan is an autonomous region that is protected by the Iraqi Constitution; and it’s also an internationally recognized entity; many foreign countries have established consulates in its Capital Hawler (Erbil) too!

In the early 1990’s, when the no fly zone was established in Kurdistan-Iraq by the US and their Coalition partners to protect the Kurdish people from Dreaded man Saddam Hussein’s regime wrath, many political pundits thought there could be a light at the end of Tunnel for the Kurdish people’s aspirations, that the Kurdish political parties in Iraq would play their cards correctly and would not let this political opportunity be missed as it has previously. But as time went on, the anomaly of Kurdish political polarizations have fallen into so much disarray that the light at the end of tunnel seems to be fading!

For decades, a lot of people inside and outside of Kurdistan, both partisan and nonpartisan people, have advised the KRG leadership that the status quo policy can’t continue; they need revamp themselves. If they don’t revamp themselves, what is left of the KRG, has a high possibility of fading away.

Just a thought, since Bafel Talabani grew up in London and speaks with an English accent, and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi lived in London too, since Bafel, his mother, and many other PUK Leaders infamously handed Kirkuk to Abadi thru Qasim Solaimani, the head of Quds force, maybe Bafel can explain the Iraqi constitution in the English language to Mr. Abadi!

Omar Sindi, a senior writer, analyst and columnist for iKurd.net, Washington, United States.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.