Iraqi Kurdish fighters displayed the flag of Kurdistan in Erbil.
BAGHDAD
— At checkpoints across Baghdad, soldiers have defied a recent order
from the prime minister to remove Shiite religious flags and replace
them with Iraqi ones. At schools in the northern city of Kirkuk,
students have raised Kurdish flags. And in the southern port city of
Basra angry citizens have designed their own flag, anchored by the image
of a single drop of oil.
Then, of course, there are the black flags of the Islamic State, the extremist group in control of about a third of the country.
Perhaps not since modern Iraq
was created nearly a century ago by the fusion of three Ottoman
provinces — Basra, Baghdad and Mosul — have more people challenged the
idea of Iraq as a unified state.
Even
as the new government is scrambling to defeat the militants of the
Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, it faces an underlying
challenge that may be tougher: promoting a new sense of national
identity that, even if it cannot transcend the differences between Sunni
and Shiite, Arab and Kurd, at least basically holds them together as
countrymen.
Some
officials have called for reinstating mandatory military service, in
the belief it would bring communities together. Others have suggested
promoting mixed marriages between Sunnis and Shiites by offering cash
incentives. Still others say that promoting Iraq’s pre-Islamic past, as
the cradle of civilization, could offer something from which Iraqis
could build a degree of national unity.
State
television is in propaganda overdrive, with dramas portraying
battlefield victories punctuated by the raising of the Iraqi flag — a
celluloid counterpoint to the true story on the ground, where the flags
of various militias indicate the erosion of the state’s reach.
“The
identity issue — getting an identity that all Iraqis can agree on so
the state stays together — is serious,” said Phebe Marr, a prominent
historian of modern Iraq. “This is a struggle for a new vision of Iraq.”
By
every measure, it is a struggle in collision with the realities of life
here, as communities become more isolated from one another.
Ehab
al-Maliki, a famous Iraqi poet, has placed his talents in the service
of the national project, appearing on state television, sometimes in a
military uniform and holding a gun, to recite patriotic poems.
His
goal, he said, is to use his poems “to promote national unity and the
convergence of views, and to call for peaceful coexistence and
nonviolence between communities.”
For this, he has received numerous death threats.
One,
in a text message, read: “You are a Shiite dog, a bastard, and we swear
to God we will cut your belly out and give it to the dogs. You don’t
deserve life and we will hunt you down.”
Graphic: Areas Under ISIS Control
In
a recent decree, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered the armed
forces not to fly Shiite religious and militia flags. The banners have
long aggrieved Iraq’s Sunni minority, who used to rule Iraq before the
American invasion. Mr. Abadi was praised for this step by the United
Nations’ Iraq representative in a speech in New York as a first step of
“a broader initiative to restore confidence among Iraq’s communities.”
The problem, though, is that the Shiite flags are not coming down, and are not likely to.
At
the V.I.P. checkpoint to the Green Zone, the government enclave in
Baghdad, a soldier explained recently that when the flag order was
handed down, people chose their faith over their commander in chief.
There were no Iraqi flags at the checkpoint, only the black-and-green
flags of Imam Hussein, the revered Shiite martyr.
“The
secondary identities — cultural, religious, our ethnicity — have
prevailed,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s former national security
adviser. “We all went to our little corners. Over the last decade, we
have been looking for a new identity.”
A
struggle for a national identity has persisted since the country’s
modern founding after World War I, and has challenged all of Iraq’s
authorities, from monarchs to dictators to occupiers.
Under
the Ottomans, the primary identity was simply being a Muslim. After the
British took charge, and for decades afterward, the ideology of Arab
nationalism — “a hankering for a larger state,” in Ms. Marr’s words —
united many of Iraq’s leaders.
Later,
Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party ruled with an iron grip that allowed
no other creed than obedience. And for a time, in the 1970s and ’80s,
an increasing middle class that benefited from the state — not to
mention the Iran-Iraq war — gave rise to some sentiments of national
identity and patriotism, Ms. Marr said.
When the Americans invaded, for Iraqi society, “it was like a cover coming off a pressure cooker,” Mr. Rubaie said.
Ms.
Marr first visited Iraq in 1957 to conduct research for her graduate
thesis. She has visited and studied the country ever since, and in 1982
published the first edition of her highly regarded book, “The Modern
History of Iraq,” which chronicles the country’s tumultuous past
century, including a half-dozen coups, the monarchy’s ouster and many
wars. None of those events, she said, threatened the integrity of the
state as thoroughly as the current crisis does.
“It
never occurred to me when I wrote this that it would be a question if
Iraq stays together,” said Ms. Marr, who is working on a new edition.
Few
expect the country to formally break apart soon. But many are suddenly
talking about the possibility — long a subject of Western think tanks
but more and more a topic of discussion in the cafes and living rooms of
ordinary Iraqis, and in the salons and offices of the powerful.
“We
don’t feel like we have a country that will defend us and protect us
and love us,” said Arkan Hussain, a 28-year-old Sunni man who lives near
Tikrit, where the Islamic State is largely in control. “Each and every
one of us has forgotten his country, and started thinking about his
tribe and sect.”
Similarly,
Wafa Muhammad, a Shiite woman in southern Iraq, said, “as for the
national identity, no one is crying for Iraq. Everyone is crying for his
sect or faith, and you rarely find anyone who cries for Iraq.”
After
the British took control of Mesopotamia and tried to shape it into a
modern nation-state called Iraq, Gertrude Bell, the diplomat credited with drawing the country’s borders,
visited a prominent Baghdad farmer and local leader to ask his advice
on how to knit together Iraq’s many ethnicities and faiths. To prepare
for the visit of Miss Bell — as she was known to Iraqis — the farmer
stopped feeding his roosters. When she came, he put the hungry roosters
in a cage, and the result was a bloody mess.
The
farmer then turned to Miss Bell, as the story is related today by one
of his descendants, Muthanna al-Lami, and said: “We had 400 years of the
Ottomans, and we have suffered under them. Please help the Iraqis and
don’t let them fight like these roosters.”
More
than a decade later, the king that she helped install in power, Faisal
I, wrote: “With my heart filled with
sadness, I have to say that it is
my belief that there is no Iraqi people inside Iraq. There are only
diverse groups with no national sentiments. They are filled with
superstitious and false religious traditions with no common grounds
between them.”
The same could largely be said today. If anything, many Iraqis say, unity is something for the far-off future.
“Reconciliation
cannot take place right now,” said Amar Ahmed, 42, of Tikrit. “But
after decades from now, maybe the next generations can forget what has
happened with all this bloodshed.”
