Pierre-Jean Luizard
Introduction
The Iraqi state within its current borders never existed until the proclamation of the British resident in Baghdad, Sir Percy Cox, in November 1920, of a provisional Arab state, which was reattached, in 1925, following a decision of the League of Nations, the Mosul vilayet to the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. There were various communities: the Sunni Arabs, mainly in the cities of Baghdad and Mosul, as well as in the province between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Shiites, further south, mainly in the two vilayets of Baghdad and Basra, Kurds in the northern and eastern mountains… and many(s) other minority communities.
A ruling imperial majority for centuries
Effendis, the Ottoman state officials, the military, religious authorities, the Ashraf, the descendants of the Prophet, and the sheikhs of the Sufi brotherhoods, these elites of large cities, mostly Arab, did not perceive themselves as a minority.
Local relays of the power of the sultan-caliph of Istanbul representing Sunnism monopolised power for centuries since the Abbasid caliphate. To these urban elites must be added the cast of the great tribal sheikhs, divided between Sunnism and Shiism depending on the region.
One can only imagine the trauma that the demise of the Ottoman state and the creation by a European country of a nation-state inside new borders could have caused to this imperial community. Mainly because the Sunni minority (in a predominantly Sunni Arab world) would have never even conceived that power could have slipped away from their hands.
This explains why, without hesitation, these elites approached the British occupying force, looking for local allies. The Sunni Arabs passed, without transition, by their elites, from the relay of the Ottoman State to that of the new Iraqi State whose monopoly they took over with the support of the British1.
Sunni Arabs' domination over the Iraqi state lasted more than eighty years (from 1920 to 2003) and survived several military coups. Excluding the other two large communities (the Shiites and the Kurds) that make up three-quarters of the population, the Iraqi state was thus in perpetual warfare with its society when it was not with neighbouring countries (Iran, Kuwait). The latest avatar of that murderous system was the regime of Saddam Hussein, whose fall, under the blows of a US-led coalition, resulted in the collapse of the first Iraqi state..[1]
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