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286 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the Ottoman empire and its modern metamorphosis as a unified nation-state.
Even the appearance of nationhood is illusory, for the population of Iraq is
made up of a number of separate communities, each distinguished from the
others by racial, religious or even national differences. There are Sunni Arabs
and Shii Arabs, Kurds and Yazidis, Turcomans, Jews and Christians, none of
whom, in the judgement of one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful
scholars of recent Iraqi political history, ‘accepts the State of Iraq in its present
form, and to all of [whom] it remains an artificial political entity’.* Because
there is no general political community there is no common basis for the rule of
law, so that political differences are resolved by violence, coercion and revolt.
The Shiis, who constitute at least half the population of roughly eleven million
souls and inhabit the lower half of the country from Baghdad southwards,
resent the Sunni supremacy in the government. The Kurds and Turcomans,
who are Sunni and five mainly in the north and north-east, chafe under the
Arab ascendancy; while the scattered groups of Jews and Christians are kept in
subjection as non-Muslim minorities.

One reason why a proper sense of Iraqi nationhood has not developed is that
many in the Sunni community, which comprises about a quarter of the
population and is concentrated principally in a territorial triangle whose apexes
are Mosul, Baghdad and Rutha (in the west towards Syria), assert that their
prime loyalty belongs to the Arab nation as a whole. Arab nationalism, how­
ever, is inseparable from Islam, and Sunni, or orthodox, Islam at that. Thus, to
quote the opinion of the scholar just mentioned:

It has meant that nationalism as advocated by the Iraqi political elite could appeal to
only one community, and in that sense it has become sectarian and divisive. In a mosaic
society like that of Iraq the introduction of the concept of national autonomy linked to
religion, as it is in the Arab nationalist ideology, could hardly encourage national
cohesion.
For the greater part of the past twenty years, ever since the destruction of the
monarchy, Iraq has been ruled by a military junta, and for the last decade at
least this junta has been dominated by the leaders of the Iraqi branch of the
Arab Baath Party. The army and the police, and more especially the officer
corps, are traditionally recruited from the Sunni communities dwelling along
the Tigris north of Baghdad, and along the middle reaches of the Euphrates.
For the Sunni army and air-force officers drawn from these communities the
pan-Arab and socialist ideology of the Baathist movement held a strong appeal,
and it was they who overthrew Qassim in 1963, largely in the name of
pan-Arabism. Though they had to wait another five years before achieving
absolute power in the state, they succeeded in those years in purging the higher

ranks of the armed forces of all Shii and other non-Sunni officers.
The purges did not stop there, however, but have continued down to e
present day. Like so many revolutionary movements, the Baath party

• Abbas Kelidar, ‘Iraq: the search for stability’, Conflict Studies no. 59-