Sectarianism

The story of the Iraqi Accountability and Justice and Election Commissions’ banning of 500 candidates from the March 2010 voting for alleged Baathist ties has taken a few new turns. First, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has finally come out in favor of the ban. He said that the decision of the Accountability and Justice Commission should be adhered to.

Iraq is entering its seventh year since the U.S. invasion. Many things have changed in that time period, from the chaos that followed the collapse of the state after Saddam was overthrown, to the civil war that erupted, to the Surge. At the end of 2009 three Iraq analysts, Sam Parker of the United States Institute for Peace, Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation, and Reidar Visser of the Norwegian Institute of International Relations, wrote pieces speculating on what lay ahead for Iraq.

Dr. Michael Izady of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs recently gave an interview to the Swiss-based International Relations and Security Network. He presented a series of maps that he put together on Baghdad during Iraq’s civil war. They show the effects of the fighting as the capital went from a mixed Sunni-Shiite city, into a segregated one.

In February 2009 the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs released a report entitled “More than ‘Shiites and ‘Sunnis,’ How a Post-Sectarian Strategy Can Change the Logic and Facilitate Sustainable Political Reform In Iraq.” The paper was written by members of the Norwegian Institute, including Reidar Visser, who is a research fellow there and runs the blog