RAMADI — Wearing military fatigues with his cleric's turban, Sheikh Ali Muhaibes brought Friday prayers in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland to a climax with chilling words for the Shiite-led government. “If you want jihad, we're ready. If you want confrontation, we're ready. And if you want us to go to Baghdad, we're coming,” he roared to the crowd in the western province of Anbar. For months, Sunnis have been protesting against Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, whom they accuse of marginalizing their minority sect and monopolizing power since US-led troops toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Now the mood is suddenly uglier. Government concessions had begun to defuse Sunni unrest, but, when security forces raided a protest camp in the town of Hawija on April 23, clashes swiftly spread to other Sunni areas, raising fears that Iraq might slide back into the kind of all-out sectarian bloodletting that ravaged it in 2006-07. “We worked together to bury sectarianism, but it is rearing its head again,” Maliki told Sunni and Shiite clerics at an Islamic “rapprochement and dialogue” conference Saturday. But many Iraqis fear such efforts will prove futile. War fatigue may be wearing off, US troops who once acted as a buffer are long gone and the war in neighboring Syria is fueling Sunni-Shiite rivalry across the Middle East. Protest leaders in Anbar have urged Sunni tribes to provide 100 armed men each for a self-defense “army” for the province. “We do not accept to live as second-class citizens. We are the sons of Iraq,” said Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Al-Zubaie, a tribal leader in Ramadi, the provincial capital. “We have rights ... and when the government denies them, the only way to prove our dignity is through the barrel of a gun.” High-school teacher Mustafa, 28, used to visit the protest camp only on Fridays. Then, he says, the army killed his father and now he goes after class every day, eager for revenge. His story reflects a wider recrudescence of sectarian hatred in a country still searching for a stable compromise among Sunnis, Shiites and ethnic Kurds in the post-Saddam era. “Iraqi politics may be on the verge of relapsing into a period of sectarian violence, where a new power-sharing deal between the parties is likely needed to reset communal relations,” said Ramzy Mardini at the Beirut-based Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is an intensity in sentiment and rhetoric that remained dormant for years, but whose undercurrents are surfacing and seeping into discourse and behavior,” he said. Sectarian tensions have also heightened friction among Sunnis divided over what they want and how to achieve it. Sunni demands range from amending allegedly discriminatory laws to tearing up the constitution and creating an autonomous region like the Kurdish one in the north, by force if need be. Many tribal leaders have little appetite for more violence, criticizing militants for infiltrating the protest movement. One influential chief in Ramadi, who asked not to be named, said a force was being prepared to confront those he said were seeking to plunge Anbar province into “a river of blood”. — Reuters
