Many in the Arab world must look at Iraq’s prime minister and wonder how he sleeps at night. With the state imploding, falling oil prices, industrial-scale corruption, not to mention vast chunks of his country in the hands of ISIL, it’s hard to imagine the prime minister gets any rest at all. I’m told he manages to sleep four hours a night, such are the demands of keeping Iraq from falling into the abyss.
Yet what has Haider Al Abadi achieved during his first year in office?
He inherited a country that many would argue had already fallen over the edge on so many issues that it remains a mystery how the central government operates at all. Indeed, many are already drawing up the blueprint of a decentralised country with power devolved to the regions.
It’s a nice idea, but a naive one. Central to all of Mr Al Abadi’s problems is how to reach out to Sunni groups and muster their fighting spirit to enrol in the regular army. Most would prefer to fight in newly formed paramilitaries – yet this poses a threat to the existing Shia-led ones operating now.
Mr Al Abadi has not succeeded in galvanising Sunni support yet. Indeed, it was the current fragmented security set-up that led to ISIL capitalising and capturing Fallujah and Ramadi in January 2014 and Mosul six months later. Mr Al Abadi can hardly be blamed for the fall of Mosul, but its loss led to powerful Shia leaders across Iraq boosting their own paramilitaries to defend their own regions.
Barely days after taking office in September 2014, Mr Al Abadi oversaw the creation of an umbrella group of Shia militias aimed at fighting ISIL, which is not liked by Shia regional leaders as it undermines their political fervour.
And herein lies the rub. How do you fight ISIL with limited numbers of Shia militias, whose very presence threatens you politically, while boosting Sunni paramilitaries, which might even lead to civil war?
On the one hand, Shia militias have warned against the formation of Sunni paramilitaries, which they fear will defect in numbers to ISIL. On the other, the move towards the Sunnis resonates with many as going back to the old days of rounding up the usual political suspects. Critics see Sunni political figures as corrupt and ineffective.
Many Sunnis believe deep down that the country is heading towards a religious leadership anyway and wonder what the political payback would be for Mr Al Abadi if his own army and Iran-backed paramilitaries seized back ISIL-held Sunni territory.
Tikrit will be noted as a stain on Mr Al Abadi’s first year in office. In May, his own Shia militias took it back from ISIL, but the wholesale looting, destruction of property and human rights violations that followed have led to many Sunni observers asking whether Mr Al Abadi is able to exert sufficient control.
It is Mr Al Abadi’s failing that he has yet to convince both Shias and Sunnis that the only way to take back ISIL-held territory is with the full backing of the Sunni themselves.
Mr Al Abadi has made some progress with reform, although his critics argue that he is a great believer in proposing draft legislation without having the political might to implement the same laws. A good example is the recent proposal for a national guard, aimed at breaking the Sunni-Shia stalemate over how to fight ISIL. Another is how he has failed to let the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan depart from Baghdad, after his own treasury failed to keep up oil payments from Erbil, which is now selling oil independently, with Turkey, and some claim even Israel, as clients.
The money was just not there. And so his real target should be graft, which many argue he is simply not tackling head-on. Granted, he recently fired more than 120 senior officials, which made the headlines. And in all fairness, when he took office he immediately fired 36 senior officers who were believed to be part of a huge corruption racket under Nouri Al Maliki, his predecessor, which involved a scam that siphoned off millions of dollars through a ghost employee scheme. Downsizing the cabinet too was perhaps inevitable.
But in these hard times, Mr Al Abadi has to be a smarter economist. He needs to shut out any talk of the fanciful schemes recently floated by his advisers to boost Iraq’s oil production – which can’t be done using the existing rickety old infrastructure anyway – and needs to really control rampant corruption. If he doesn’t those four hours of sleep may give way to some very, very restless nights.
Updated 29 Sep 2015 | Soruce: The National |