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Iraqi Sunnis Feel Marginalized Under New U.S. Order
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"The Sunnis have been marginalized by recent events," Al-Yawar (AFP)
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BAGDAD,
December 23 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Iraqis Sunnis
are bitterly resentful at being marginalized under the new U.S.-led
order in post-war Iraq, charging that the Americans were rewarding the
Kurds and the Shiites with drawing up the country's political
landscape.
"The
Sunnis have been marginalized by recent events," Sheikh Ghazi
al-Yawar, one of the heads of the Shammar tribe, one of the biggest
clans in Iraq, and a member of the Governing Council, told Agence
France-Presse (AFP) Monday, December 22.
"We
do not have a political platform, while the Kurds have enjoyed
autonomy for 12 years and the Shiites had political parties
representing them abroad," he said.
For
the first time since modern day Iraq was founded in 1921, the Sunnis
are no longer in charge of Iraq.
They
have only five seats on the 25-member Interim Governing Council (IGC).
They are nervous at the site of the country's Kurds clamoring for a
federalist state and Iraq's Shiite majority poised to rule Iraq after
years of oppression under captured former President Saddam Hussein.
Ghazi
said at the time the Council was being assembled in June and early
July, "the Americans listened to their allies" like the
Kurds and the Shiites "but excluded the Arab nationalists and the
Sunni community at large".
He
said that after the downfall of Saddam, a Sunni, the Sunnis have been
stigmatized by their association with his regime.
"The
Americans had the wrong impression that the Baath party is a Sunni
party. Now we hope that they are taking a new approach and want
greater participation from the Arab Sunnis," he said.
Ghazi
said he wants the Sunnis, who make up a quarter of Iraq's 25 million
citizens, just to have a fair chance to participate in all aspects of
life in Iraq.
Communal
War
For
his part, Sunni leader Sheikh Abdel Salam al-Kubeissi warned of
schemes aimed at pitting the Sunnis and Shiites against each other,
unleashing a deadly communal war.
"We
will not let those who rode in with the American tanks drag us into a
communal war," Kubeissi said, alluding to the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution, the largest Shiite political party in Iraq.
He
listed the attacks on his community, including a bombing of a Sunni
mosque in Baghdad last September that
left three dead, blaming Shiite groups from abroad for
"provocations against the Sunnis".
Kubeissi,
one of the heads of the Muslim Ulema Committee, which groups 3,000
Sunni scholars around Iraq, also lashed out at the Sunni Muslim
members of the U.S.-appointed Council for "being an instrument
aimed at promoting the occupation".
The
committee was formed in the aftermath of Saddam's fall last April and
Kubeissi offers a confrontational stance towards the Americans.
His
organisation has issued a decree "outlawing all cooperation with
the occupation and the Governing Council and has called for peaceful
resistance by demonstrating and civil disobedience".
Outside
his mosque, banners mourn the death of four Sunnis who died December
15 when street demonstrations over Saddam's capture degenerated
into clashes with U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police.
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