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The decision by Yemens Houthis to expand their influence in Iraq marks a critical juncture in the groups regional strategy, raising significant concerns about regional stability amid ongoing conflicts and geopolitical rivalries, particularly the Israel-Hamas war.

On July 9, Iraqi media reported that Abu Idris al-Sharafi, the Houthi representative in the country, opened headquarters in Baghdad's al-Jadriyah neighborhood, near the Green Zone and close to offices of senior members of Iraqi parties and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). The latter is a grouping of predominantly Shiite Iran-backed militias whose salaries are paid by the government.

A few days earlier, Sharafi visited the PMU headquarters, emphasizing their unity with the Houthi movement, and toured several southern Iraqi provinces, meeting various tribal and religious leaders accompanied by PMU officers.

In addition to raising questions about the Houthis own strategy, the groups expansion into Iraq threatens Baghdads delicate balance between national interests and regional dynamics, highlighting the potential consequences of this power shift.

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Is Houthi expansion in Iraq a genuine threat or smoke screen? - Al-Monitor

On the morning of Aug. 3, 2014, the Islamic State group launched a ruthless and swift campaign in Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq. The target was Yezidis: a monotheistic religious group whose members have long been persecuted.

As forces affiliated with the regional Kurdish government fled in disarray, IS fighters captured and enslaved an estimated 6,800 Yezidis, mostly women and children. About 1,500 Yezidis were executed. A similar number lost their lives from excessive heat, thirst or starvation while stranded on Mount Sinjar, before U.S. airstrikes several days later enabled escape to the relative safety of Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq.

The entire Yezidi population of Sinjar, about 250,000 people, lost their homes: around half of all Yezidis across the globe, by my estimate.

Ten years later, it is easy to look back on the massacres as the work of extremist militants. But IS in Iraq recruited heavily among local Sunni Muslims from northwestern Iraq. People who lived alongside Yezidis for many years became their tormentors, rapists, looters and killers.

What explains the ferocity of this genocidal campaign? As a scholar of political violence and Middle East politics, I argue that two main factors led to the anti-Yezidi atrocities.

First, Muslim authorities have historically stigmatized Yezidis and denied their existence as a faith group one of the focuses of my 2024 book, Liminal Minorities. Second, transformations after the U.S. invasion of Iraq fueled resentment, which extremists channeled against this marginalized religious group.

The Yezidi experience reflects a global pattern: a type of marginalization and discrimination against faith groups whom I call liminal minorities.

Liminal minorities have two core characteristics. First, they lack theological recognition in the eyes of the areas dominant religion. In other words, more powerful faith groups do not acknowledge the legitimacy of their religion and denigrate the minoritys beliefs and rituals.

Second, liminal minorities are subjected to widespread stigma transmitted across generations. They are often perceived as a threat to moral order and at times alleged to engage in sexually deviant practices. These patterns of stigmatization beget discrimination.

In addition to Yezidis, liminal minorities include Alevis in Turkey, Bahais in Iran, and Ahmadis in Indonesia and Pakistan. Religious liminality is not exclusive to the Muslim world: For example, Jehovahs Witnesses in a variety of countries and Falun Gong in China are also liminal minorities.

Yezidis marginal status is not new. Under the Ottoman Empire, Christian and Jewish communities were offered a limited degree of protection and autonomy in return for paying a special tax known as the millet system. These groups were recognized as People of the Book: monotheists whose religious faith was accepted by Muslim authorities. Yezidis, however, lacked this status.

Even today, Yezidis are often insulted as devil worshipers. According to the Yezidi faith, God entrusted the world to his lead angel, Taws Melek, which means Peacock Angel. Some Muslim religious authorities, however, conflate this angel with Iblis, the personal name of the devil in Islam.

This misidentification gained widespread acceptance among Muslim clerics by the 16th century. Under Ottoman rulers and Kurdish tribal leaders, the claim was used to justify extreme forms of violence against Yezidis, including mass enslavement and killings.

The stigmatization of Yezidis remained widespread in Iraq throughout the late 20th century. There were no large-scale episodes of religiously motivated massacres targeting Yezidis under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet many were forced out of their mountain villages as part of his partys Arabization campaigns: forced deportations aimed at weakening non-Arab minorities in the countrys north.

Iraq is home to people of both major schools of Islam Sunni and Shiite as well as minority faiths such as Yezidis, Christians and Sabaean-Mandaeans, who follow an ancient monotheistic religion. The country is also home to many different ethnic groups, with a large Arab majority and sizable minorities of Kurds, Turkmens and Assyrians.

Sunni Arabs, who make up a minority of the population, formed the backbone of the Saddam regime, while Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds were mostly excluded from power. After the U.S. invasion, however, the Shiite majority was able to dominate electoral politics, and many Sunni Arabs complained of being marginalized.

The Kurdish region, meanwhile, consolidated its autonomy. Yezidi votes become crucial to Kurdish claims for additional territory spurring more Sunni resentment of the Yezidis.

My fieldwork, including extensive interviews between 2017 and 2019, suggests that the Islamic States goal of ethnic cleansing capitalized on these feelings of resentment and aimed to undermine Kurdish territorial claims.

Hundreds of Yezidis became victims of violent attacks well before 2014. As the Islamic State group gained power, it further intensified anti-Yezidi stigmas. The group instructed fighters that extreme forms of violence, including systematic rape, were justified by their faith.

The combination of historical hatreds, political resentment and denying the legitimacy of Yezidis faith helped spark the violence that devastated Iraqs Yezidi community in 2014.

In the wake of the genocide carried out by IS, the Yezidis received unprecedented international attention as a persecuted faith group, and several countries, such as Germany, created resettlement programs for Yezidi refugees. Yezidis in the diaspora became more visible and organized, demanding justice and aiming to mobilize public attention.

Nevertheless, their conditions remain dire. Yezidis are unable to return to Sinjar, which is still an insecure zone contested among rival armed forces. Many remain in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, facing an uncertain future.

Others have sought refuge abroad, and some benefited from specialized humanitarian asylum programs like Germanys. The country has been home to part of the Yezidi diaspora since the early 1970s and emerged as a major destination for Yezidis fleeing Iraq after 2014. Today, about 200,000 Yezidis are estimated to live there.

Yet the rise of anti-immigration sentiments in Europe has made the Yezidis situation similar to that of many other migrants and refugees. As public attention to the genocide begins to fade, these newcomers face an increasingly inhospitable political climate.

Facing an existential precarity in their homeland and legal limbo in the diaspora, the Yezidi liminality persists.

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The Yezidi genocide devastated Iraqs community 10 years ago but the roots of the prejudice that fueled it were much deeper - The Conversation...

(July 22, 2024 / Jerusalem Strategic Tribune)

Dont repeat our mistakeswe can do it ourselves. This line occurred to me as I listened to discussions of the day after in Gaza. Plans and ideas need to address the detailed problems of implementation.

I do not pose as an expert on Israel or Palestinian affairs. Rather I draw from the painful lived experiences of serving in Iraq (2004-2005) and Afghanistan (2005-2007) and subsequent years working in and on Afghanistan and reflecting on other experiences from Vietnam to the Philippines.

My lessons are as follows:

Reform of a corrupt, inefficient government through outside advisers is a mirage. We cannot substitute for effective local leaders or create them if they do not exist.

Security must precede economic development. Trying to make major advances in both at the same time will not build local support.

International Arab forces may be an important element of security, but they neither can nor will work on their own.

A U.S. role will be essential to the operation of the security force.

Meeting these challenges is possible but will require careful examination and understanding that there will be a high chance of failure. Above all, it will be important not to settle on a concept or idea without having carefully thought through how it is to be implemented.

Who governs?

If Israel is not to administer Gaza then another entity must do so. Some Israelis have considered growing a government out of the Gaza clans. The Biden administration has called for a role for the Palestinian Authority. The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan raises serious questions about both ideas.

The idea of using the clans in Gaza to govern requires that groups who have been largely powerless suddenly assume power and cooperate to utilize it responsibly and without the benefit of a demonstrated popular mandate. This is unrealistic. Real power and real money are at issue. The clans may have a political base, although how strong after years of Hamas suppression is speculative. What they do not have is power of their own. Their ability to govern will be challenged by Hamas and other radical groups.

Without forces of their own, they will be dependent on others. If they turn to Israel, they become puppets of a detested outsider. If they must turn to Arab forces or other outsiders, then they will find that they cannot depend on orders being followed because other nations will not simply abandon their authority over their own forces.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, where there was much stronger leadership from the United States than a clan government is likely to have, the forces of Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and others each responded to separate national directions and separate red cardsi.e., things they would not do without specific permission from their own governments. Such approval was rarely given and never quickly.

The history of Arab forces is more limited but not more inspiring. UAE special forces in Afghanistan were comparatively effective but most other Arab force presences were largely symbolic, unwilling to engage quickly or effectively. In Yemen, Saudi and UAE forces obeyed different political directives from home and developed separate political alliances.

Aside from security, considered more below, an authority in Gaza will be challenged to build a coherent and functioning authority out of todays ruins while excluding Hamas from visible power. Lacking established power and probably unity, this authority is unlikely to be the result of the Gaza clans taking over. In Iraq we saw and are still seeing how the shifting power dynamics that result from depending on local political groupings to govern actually undermined coherent governance. In Afghanistan, the parliament quickly became an auction house for moving foreign assistance and projects to MPs political supporters. Moving resources to supporters is in many respects a natural function of politics, but when it is a raw contest for power unrestrained by established institutions and respected political norms it is unlikely to lead to coherent governance.

This brings one to the P.A., which seems to figure prominently in what is known of the American proposals for administration. That the P.A. is both inefficient and corrupt is well known. The U.S. answer is some form of political rebuilding of the P.A. Perhaps that might be possiblebut not in the time frame being discussed. Here the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan are particularly instructive but need to be examined in some depth. The underlying problems lay in leadership, not because leaders did not understand the value of better or even more honest government but because their other interests, including survival, took priority. If reducing support is likely to lead to loss of power, few leaders will be willing to commit political suicide. Large networks of support have been built on the ability to siphon off resources. This is unlikely to be voluntarily undermined in the interest of better government.

Pressure, through conditionality, was invoked as a solution by international donors for 20 years. It failed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a complex subject but one of the main reasons is that the rewards of corruption go to the individual and pressure is applied to the state. If a person or party can put away millions of dollars in foreign lands, the fact that aid may be cut off to the state is rarely a restraint on behavior.

Selective and targeted pressure is possible but is difficult to manage without detailed knowledge and skill. I once cut off $10 million for diesel power in Kabul to force a policy change in the Ministry of Power. When nothing happened as a result it took time to understand that the minister thought my demands were actually a cover for forcing his removal. Thus, from his point of view, there was no reason to concede on the policy issue. Only when I was fortunate enough to find a local contact with the technical knowledge to understand what I sought, and the confidence of the minister to be believed, were we able to get a resolution. This is simply a small example of how difficult it is to apply even very targeted pressure.

Does this mean that reform is impossible? No, but it does underline the importance of local leadership committed to better governance for their own reasons. In the Philippines, President Ramon Magsaysay became famous for the kinds of governmental reforms and personnel appointments so critical to reform and to suppression of an insurgency. But in the case of Vietnam, when his friend and sometimes mentor Edward Lansdale tried to persuade Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem to follow similar policies, the effort was largely unsuccessful. Ghana and Rwanda also show that reform and improvement in governance is possible but, as in the Philippines, the essential element is the determination of the national leader.

Even without a single, dynamic change in leaders, changes in political culture have happened. Taiwan and Korea have each moved from kleptocratic authoritarian governments to functioning and prosperous democracies, but these changes took decades. Without either long term changes in culture or dramatic changes in leadership, similar success stories are hard to find.

The United States has been unwilling to confront the requirement of having either strong local leaders who want reform or very long term institutional and social change. Our national preference has been to increase money and advice in search of rapid change. This has been the story not only of Afghanistan and Iraq but also of Vietnam. The approach has failed.

That said, the circumstances could be different in Gaza. The P.A. has had effective administrators, so there is capability, but such effective individuals were ultimately crippled by the senior political leadership. Without backing for reform from the most senior leaders, neither dedicated local bureaucrats nor outside advisers brought reform in Afghanistan or Iraq. How that would be different in Gaza will require considerable thought beyond short term advice and financing.

Security challenges

Security trumps economic development in building political support. We had 20 years of trying to bring development without putting in place security in Afghanistan, on the theory that development would generate popular support. That effort failed. I do not mean that development can or should be ignored, but if local leaders cannot be reasonably assured of physical survival, they will not support the government.

This leads to some difficult issues. Hamas is likely to survive as at least a low-level movement with violent potential. The Palestine Islamic Jihad is still active,amappingof militant groups in Gaza lists several others and new ones may arise. A force that can successfully confront them will need to meet several requirements.

First, it will have to be militarily capable. P.A. forces are not numerous enough to do the full job on their own. An Arab force alone will have the debilities noted above. Moreover, the idea that Arab countries will put their forces in a position where they will have to kill Palestinian Arabs on behalf of Israeli security does not pass the laugh test, unless the governments concerned can relate operations directly to progress toward a Palestinian state. Such political linkage is part of U.S. proposals. It is a high bar for Israeli politics.

Even assuming an international force with a significant Arab component can be constructed, it would need to be able to deal with Israeli security demands and requirements. Israeli requirements to suppress threats to Israel cannot and should not be ignored. In many respects, P.A. operations in the West Bank before the Gaza outbreak of Oct. 7 did meet most Israeli requirements. But they did so in part with the involvement of U.S. and other military advisers whose presence was essential both to the training of the force and to resolving tensions between the Palestinian and Israeli forces.

How a Palestinian or multinational force is to be trained, governed and overseen is a significant issue. Neither the detailed plans nor the time needed to be functional have been spelled out.The adequacy of both plans and time needs to be considered before the concept is accepted, not after the force is on the ground.

Our own experiences in multiple countries, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, testifies to the fact that this type of operation is difficult and time consuming. American forces have excelled at building the capability of small units. They have largely failed to construct whole armies in the midst of combat.

The legal mandate

In the case of Gaza, there will be an additional issue. Israel can be expected to have repeated and strong demands for action of the security force on a wide range of recurring issues. Israel will have very good reasons to strike unilaterally if it perceives a threat. These day-to-day challenges will require prompt and decisive responses. That suggests some necessary elements. One is that the force providing security has the unity of command to respond effectively to challenges. If it has to seek guidance from some form of committee it is likely to be crippled, and the Israelis will not be patient partners.

Secondly, the mandate of the security force must be strong enough for decisive, including lethal, action. The international record of agreeing to such a mandate is not encouraging.Pressures for compromise on everything from force equipment to rules of engagement can be expected in the search for multilateral political agreement, especially if U.N. Security Council agreement is required, as is likely. But watering down the mandate to secure political agreement will risk creating forces like UNIFIL in Lebanon or the early U.N. forces in Bosnia or Rwanda, that were reduced to being spectators of battles and even massacres.

There are examples of forces with the necessary mandate and leadership. Bosnia after the Dayton Accords provides the best example but there are others from smaller operations like that in Sierra Leone, led by the British, and the U.N. operations in East Timor, with a multinational command and a heavily Australian-led force as recounted byLise Morage Howard. What is clear from these contrasting examples is that the mandate and leadership on the ground is critical. It would be better to give up the entire project than to accept a weak mandate or some form of committee leadership which would lead to probable failure of the policybecause of weak execution.

It is possible to succeed in such a mission but, and it is a big but, trying to field the force and build it at the same time is fraught with the potential for failureand failure would mean either the return of militants or Israeli occupation or both, and the unraveling of the political solution that depends on the force.

The indispensable US role

The future civilian and military operations will need close linkage. If the security forces are too independent, then the civilian administration will quickly be seen as weak and useless. Israeli security demands are likely to clash with the views of the administering authoritys civilian leadership. There will be ample opportunities for confrontation. How is this to be handled without either compromising security or placing the civilian administration in a position where it has to choose between being seen locally as powerless or an Israeli puppet?

There are a variety of ways of avoiding the dilemmas of mandate, authority and security described above. Whatever the course chosen, it will have to meet certain requirements. There will need to be a way of maintaining Israeli confidence in the security force, but the Israelis cannot run it or either the P.A. and the necessary countries will not cooperate or the force will lose local political acceptance. This points to the need for a U.S. military role. Other countries may be able to train and advise a local security force but only the U.S. military is likely to have the credibility to assuage Israeli concerns.

This does not mean that U.S. tactical forces must be employed. It does mean that U.S personnel will need to play a role in the overall operation of fielding a security force, managing its operations on the ground and coordinating with the political authority. There is no other country with the required political weight and acceptance to play this role. If the current Biden administration insistence on no boots on the ground prevents such a U.S. role, the odds against success will rise to dizzying heights.

The problems of the day after in Gaza are legion. It truly is a wicked problem.But if a solution is to be found, it will require close attention to the difficult areas of policy execution that extend well beyond the policy conceptions themselves.

Originally published by The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

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Lessons for postwar Gaza from Iraq and Afghanistan - JNS.org

Today marked an important moment in Iraqs road towards addressing drug trafficking through international cooperation with the holding of the 2nd Baghdad International Conference on Countering Narcotics, in the presence of UNODC, and the presentation of the report Drug Trafficking Dynamics across Iraq and the Middle East (2019-2023): Trends and Responses. The Conference was opened in the presence of H.E. Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani, Prime Minister of Iraq, H.E Abdul Amir al-Shammari, Minister of Interior, H.E. Mohammad Bin Ali Kuman, Secretary General of the Arab Interior Ministers Council (AIMC), Ms. Cristina Albertin, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Representative for the Middle East and North Africa, and Mr. Ali El Bereir, Senior Programme Coordinator and Head of the UNODC Office in Iraq. The event was also attended by representatives of Ministers of Interior from the region and neighboring countries affected by drug trafficking.

The Baghdad International Conference on Countering Narcotics aims to bring together relevant authorities and experts from countries neighboring Iraq as well as regional and key international players to find concrete solutions and recommendations to challenges faced by authorities in countering drug trafficking in the region.

H.E. Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani, Prime Minister of Iraq affirmed in the opening of the Conference that Combating drugs is a responsibility that the state must bear with all its agencies and entities, as well as our societies... Drugs and psychotropic substances are a primary factor in the instability of the region. The threat of drugs not only harms our youth but endangers our entire future. By unifying efforts and enhancing joint coordination, we can achieve the desired goal of drug-free societies.

The Drug Trafficking Dynamics across Iraq and the Middle East (2019-2023): Trends and Responses report was presented today at the Conference to provide an analysis of the main drug trafficking trends in Iraq and the Near and Middle East. In addition to posing a diagnostic of the concerning drug situation, the report provides a roadmap to assist national, regional, and international authorities in accelerating collaboration and better coordination to counter-narcotics.

The report reveals that countries in the region have experienced an escalation in both the scale and sophistication of drug trafficking over the past 10 years. This poses important destabilizing risks and is a regional and global concern. Of particular concern are the rising production, trafficking, and consumption of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), especially tablets of "Captagon," and methamphetamine.

Ms. Cristina Albertin, UNODC Regional Representative for the Middle East and North Africa stated that the Government of Iraq and its partners have stressed the need for collective responses to tackle the security, social, and economic ramifications of drug trafficking across the Near and Middle East. As seen in different regional contexts, the persistence and potential reactivation of armed groups across the region poses a significant threat, not least given their potential involvement in drug production and trafficking. Data and analysis like those provided by this report are necessary for evidence and data-driven national, regional, and global responses to this problem.

Over the past two years, the Iraqi Government has taken bold steps in combatting drugs, by reorganizing the relevant departments of the Ministry of Interior, a better-coordinated approach internally and with other Member States, and expansion of the treatment facilities. The Conference and the Report are additional contributions towards this holistic approach and will together provide a base for a series of recommendations to be adopted by participating countries and implemented to address the threats of drug trafficking.

*****

Media queries, please contact:

Nermine Abdelhamid (Ms.) | Communications and Visibility Officer UNODC Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa (ROMENA) nermine.abdelhamid@un.org

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UNODC participates in the 2nd Baghdad International Conference on Countering Narcotics and presents the report Drug Trafficking Dynamics across Iraq...

Iraq announced on Monday that it has resumed negotiations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the first time since 2008, a move that could benefit the Iraqi economy but will take considerable time.

Iraqi negotiating teams began preparatory meetings at the WTO headquarters in Geneva. The Iraqi delegation included officials from ministries in both the federal government and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Another meeting will be held at an unspecified date to review Iraqs accession to the WTO, the official Iraqi News Agency reported, citing a Trade Ministry statement.

The WTO is an intergovernmental organization that aims to foster international trade. It provides a platform for governments to negotiate trade rules and disputes with one another. Major decisions are made by the member states. The WTO has 164 members that it says are responsible for 98% of global trade.

Background: Iraq first applied to join the WTO in 2004, the year following the US invasion that toppled longtime ruler Saddam Hussein. A working party was subsequently established, but there has been little progress since then. The last time the party met formally was in 2008. An informal meeting was held in 2017, according to the WTO website.

The process has gained momentum recently. In January, a WTO delegation visited Baghdad to galvanize political support for the resumption of Iraqs WTO accession process. The discussion focused on Iraqi economic reforms and was led by Saqer bin Abdullah Al-Moqbel, Saudi Arabias ambassador to the WTO and head of the working party for Iraqs accession, the organization said in a release at the time.

A key requirement for joining the WTO is consistent trade policies throughout the country, including tariff rates and customs procedures. The differences in tariff structure between the federal government and the KRG were therefore an obstacle to Iraqs efforts to join the WTO. Iraq decided to harmonize the two customs regimes in 2019, and the federal Ministry of Finance finally approved the unified tariff framework in February of this year, the United Nations team for Iraq said in a release last week.

The KRG administers northern Iraqs Kurdistan Region and has a significant degree of autonomy from Baghdad, including its own security forces.

Why it matters: Joining the WTO could benefit Iraq. According to an April 2023 report from the Council on Foreign Relations, the WTO has been largely successful in expanding free trade. The dollar value of international trade has quadrupled since the WTOs inception in 1995, and tariffs average just 3%, the council noted.

There are also downsides to the WTO, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Globalization and free trade have their drawbacks. These includethe potential for economic inequality and job loss, the council noted in the report.

The WTO has been especially criticized regarding enforcing rules vis-a-vis China.

The WTO also struggles to perform its third job rule enforcement particularly with China. Since joining the WTO in 2001, China hasflouted global trade rulesby providing extensive support to its domestic industries and stealing technology and other intellectual property. It has faced few, if any, consequences for its actions, said the council.

China has a growing presence in Iraq, and there has been significant Chinese investment in Iraqi oil and infrastructure in recent years.

The WTO says it has helped facilitate the alleviation of poverty in developing economies by fostering trade.

Over the past generation, market-oriented reforms in places including Eastern Europe, India and China, combined with the open global economy anchored in the GATT/WTO system to turbocharge growth and trade and help lift more than a billion people out of extreme poverty, WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in September 2023.

The GATT refers to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a predecessor of the WTO.

Iraqs trade is dominated by oil. Crude petroleum accounted for 90% of Iraqs $123 billion in exports in 2022. Iraq imported $67.1 billion that year, with the top imports being refined petroleum, broadcasting equipment and cars. These figures gave Iraq a trade surplus of more than $50 billion in 2022, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

Whats next: Iraq could be in for a long wait to join the WTO. Timor-Leste joined the organization in February after seven years of negotiations. Comoros joined at the same time a process that took 17 years, Arabian Gulf Business Insight reported at the time.

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After 20 years, is Iraq making progress in bid to join WTO? - Al-Monitor