Jew World Order

Meanwhile, their own version of the permanent protest camp at Cairo’s Tahrir
Square sits on a stretch of road near the flashpoint city of Fallujah,
better known as the “graveyard of the Americans”.

These days, though, the target of their ire is not Iraq’s former occupiers,
but the democratic Iraqi government that took over in their place. The
Sunnis, who make up around a third of Iraq’s 33 million population, now
chant that the Shia-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
treats them as second-class citizens – a cry that could re-ignite the
vicious Sunni-Shia civil war of six years ago.

“These are peaceful and civilised protests demanding nothing more than
our legitimate rights,” insists Hamid al Obaid, a Sunni
parliamentarian, sipping a glass of green tea in his heavily-guarded Baghdad
compound. “All we want is fair treatment from a government that has a
monopoly of decision-making, and which is treating us unjustly.”

In an interview last week with The Telegraph, he ticked off a long list
of Sunni grievances against Mr Maliki, whom they accuse of being far too
close to the Shia autocracy in neighbouring Iran.

Draconian anti-terrorism laws introduced at the height of Iraq’s insurgency
troubles were being used to detain and jail innocent Sunnis, Mr Mutlaq said.
And under the pretext of the de-Ba’athification laws introduced by the
Americans to purge the country of pro-Saddam officials, Sunnis were also
routinely barred from senior government jobs, especially in the security
forces.

Shia politicians in Iraq deny such claims, saying that tough anti-terror laws
are still needed, that Sunnis now have their own parliamentary bloc, and
that at worst, they are tasting the medicine they once dished out themselves
under Saddam.

^{Sunnis demostrating in Ramadi on Friday (Reuters)}

But the fact that Sunnis are now mobilising in large numbers has alarmed
Western diplomats, who fear that despite the peaceful rhetoric, the
demonstrations could re-spark the sectarian conflict that killed an
estimated 30,000 Iraqis between 2005 and 2008.

While such violence is far from the peak of 2006, when up to 3,000 died in a
single month, gun attacks and car bombs continue to claim up to 50 lives or
more a week.

And just in the past week, Sunni areas of Baghdad has been abuzz with talk of
a fresh campaign of targeted assassinations and intimidation by Shia
militants, allegedly to frighten them from joining in the street protests.

In the sprawling Jihad district of Baghdad, security was stepped up last week
after threatening fliers were distributed claiming to be from a new,
Iran-backed militia called the Mukhtar Army. They warned Sunni residents to
leave or face “great agony”.

“Residents are panicking,” said Waleed Nadhim, 33, a local
shopkeeper who now plans to leave the area. “In a lawless country like
Iraq, nobody can ignore threats like this.”

There was, however, not even a warning for Hamza Mohammed Abdallah, 50, a
popular and hard-working education official killed in a drive-by shooting
outside his offices in west Baghdad last Sunday lunchtime.

“His killing is part of a plan to eliminate Sunnis from Baghdad because
the Sunnis are now holding protests,” sobbed one relative during an
interview at a house in Ameriya, another trouble-prone Sunni neighbourhood,
as he kissed a picture of Mr Abdallah stored on his mobile phone.

“We can take vengeance tonight or tomorrow, we could kill dozens of
people, but we would be killing innocents, and the Sunni clerics forbid
that, despite our strong incentive.”

There is no proof of that Shia militants were responsible for Mr Abdallah’s
killing – others believe it related to his objections to a corruption scam
being run in his office. But rumours are all that is needed in a tense
neighbourhood like Ameriya, where people are still quick to leap on the
slightest suspicions: when The Telegraph visited, the owner of house
made his children swear not to tell their friends for fear he would be seen
as a foreign spy.

The Mukhtar Army, however, does appear to exist at least in name. Its founder,
a bearded Shia cleric named Wathiq al-Battat, announced its creation to an
Iraqi television channel earlier this month, saying it was needed to prevent
a repeat of events in Syria, where Sunni rebels are pursuing the downfall of
the Iran-backed Shia regime.

Mr Maliki’s government has since issued a warrant for Mr Battat’s release, but
Sunnis say that the fact he currently remains free shows they are not taking
the threat seriously. As proof, they point out that Shia militants with much
more blood on their hands are also at liberty, in particular the Iran-backed
League of the Righteous, which was responsible for the 2007 kidnapping of
the British IT consultant, Peter Moore, and his four bodyguards, as well as
thousands of attacks on British and US troops.

In recent months the League has been establishing itself as a legitimate
political party, opening religious schools and campaign offices, but Sunnis
claim it still acts as an unofficial militia for the Iraqi government, which
acknowledges friendly relations with its political wing.

“The League have officially joined the political process, so they have
created the name of the Mukhtar Army instead,” said one senior Sunni
source.

True or not, such claims have only heightened the anger at the Sunni protests,
which many fear could now erupt into open warfare. On Friday, thousands of
demonstrators converged again around the “tent city”, which lies
on the highway between Fallujah and neighbouring Ramadi. There they heard
the Sunni finance minister, Rafaie al-Esawi, announce his resignation live
on stage. “It doesn’t honour me to be part of a sectarian government,”
he said.

It was the arrest of Mr Esawi’s bodyguards on terrorism charges last December
that sparked the current Sunni protests in the first place. Iraqi
authorities claim that they carried out assassinations along with bodyguards
employed by the Sunni vice-President, Tareq al-Hashemi, who fled the country
last year after being sentenced to death in absentia.

Mr Maliki’s opponents, however, say that on that basis, many of his own
supporters should be in jail too, and cite it as proof that he is turning
Iraq back to a one-man state.

^{Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (AFP)}

They accuse the perma-stubbled 62-year-old, who signed the death warrant that
led Saddam to the gallows, of bypassing key power-sharing agreements in
order to put his key loyalists in top security positions. Rival politicians
allege that he also uses intimidatory tactics, such as parking tanks outside
their official residences and bringing squads of thuggish-looking bodyguards
into cabinet meetings.

In his defence, Mr Maliki says that hundreds of Shia militiamen currently
languish in Iraq’s jails too, and that after six exhausting years trying to
steer the country from civil war, someone else is welcome to “try their
luck” as prime minister.

Outside observers, meanwhile, say the blame lies as much with Iraq’s
quarrelsome opposition, who have allowed Mr Maliki to run rings around them
in parliament, and a political culture still poisoned by the Saddam era.

In the words of a recent report by the International Crisis Group, Iraq’s
predicament “directly relates to the inability to overcome the legacy
of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its repressive practices: a culture of deep
suspicion, coupled with a winner-take-all and loser-lose-all form of
politics.”

Indeed, about the only thing that Mr Malik and his opponents agree on is the
risk of civil war. In an interview last week ahead of the 10th anniversary
of Iraq’s US-led invasion later this month, he warned that if President
Bashar al-Assad was toppled by Sunni rebels in Syria, there would most
likely be a “sectarian war in Iraq”. And this time, as some Iraqis
nervously acknowledge, there will be no foreign troops in the country to get
in the way.