Muqtada-al-Sadr casts his vote in Najaf at the May 12 elections. Photo: Reuters
Iraq’s May 12 national parliamentary elections saw the State of Law Coalition lose its status as the ruling party in government, with Saairun taking the reigns as Iraq’s premier political force.
The U.S begrudgingly deemed the surprise result to be “credible“, an outcome which would see their preferred Prime Minister, Nouri-al-Maliki, lose his grip on power after nearly 12 years.
However, it was the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq and the borders of Syria, Iran and Turkey who were the most concerned with the result, as it could signal to a return to the Saddam era.
It seems that Sarriun, which is led by Muqtada al-Sadr who is a Shia cleric, and includes communist parties in its alliance, could not be further away from Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime.
But remove the veneer of this drastic shift in Iraq’s parliamentary composition and the same economic problems and ethnic and religious divisions that have plagued the country since colonialism still persist.
Iraq’s colonial era officially ended in granted independence by Britain in 1932, but the borders of state were drawn up to suit strategic and economic interests of Britain and its allies in the area, with disregard for tribe-based systems that had been present for centuries.
These tensions came to a boiling point with the 1970 Iraqi–Kurdish War, after which the Kurds were granted greater autonomy via Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Kurds became increasingly more independent from Iraq culturally, and also economically as many U.S oil and finance companies set up their headquarters in the region.
When Saddam rose to power in 1979, this Kurdish autonomy was against his totalitarian ideology of state supremacy and nationalism, so he sought to violently oppress the ethnic group.
This included gassing entire Kurdish villages and towns.
After Saddam was toppled, the U.S wanted to bridge the gap between broader Iraq and the Kurdish by aiding election campaigns of Kurdish politicians in Iraq.
But resentment against the U.S and their Kurdish allies has risen among many Iraqis, as while the Kurds may have benefited from this alliance, from a human development perspective Iraq has largely stagnated since the “democratic revolution“.
For example, literacy among young Iraqis has decreased 3 per cent since the turn of the century.
In addition, there has been a rapid rise in “Saddam nostalgia” across the country, with his hard line approach to violent extremism becoming appealing in a country still licking its wounds from an ISIS wave of terror.
Although al-Sadr is a cleric, he has proposed a similar secular vision to Saddam’s, with a return to ultra-nationalism and a rejection of any U.S intervention in national affairs.
The Kurds will be collectively hoping this vision goes the way of Saddam.
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