Problematizing norms of heritage and peace: Militia mobilization and violence in Iraq

Abstract

The destruction of heritage in conflict has emerged as a key challenge to global security and the prospects of peace. In response to the deliberate targeting of heritage sites by the Islamic State (IS) and other actors in recent years, the international community has launched a number of initiatives designed to protect and reconstruct key heritage sites in complex (post-)conflict contexts. However, this article demonstrates that such initiatives are often underpinned by the norm that the protection of heritage in conflict can serve to enhance the prospects of reconciliation, stability and peace. This article problematizes this norm by focussing on the case study of Shia responses to the targeting of their religious heritage sites by the IS in Iraq from mid-2014. It documents the ways that key Shia leaders instrumentalized the case of protecting heritage not to advance peace and security, but to create entirely new militias, to recruit thousands of Shia faithful, to mobilize them to fight against the IS, and to engage in violence and human rights abuses. This raises significant concerns about whether the promotion of heritage as a pathway to peace could inadvertently exacerbate conflict and lead to renewed waves of violence and heritage destruction.

Keywords

conflict heritage Iraq Islamic State peace Shia militias

Introduction

When the militant jihadist network known as the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) conquered large swathes of Syria and Iraq from March 2013, they unleashed a cataclysmic wave of both genocidal pogroms and iconoclastic campaigns. In terms of human suffering, the IS executed thousands of innocent civilians and dumped their bodies in mass graves, kidnapped women to be used as sex slaves and forced many thousands more to live under their draconian version of Islamic law or flee for their lives. In terms of heritage destruction, the IS undertook a systematic iconoclastic programme, which saw the razing of countless cultural and religious sites. Aside from their globally publicized attacks on the Mosul Museum and UNESCO World Heritage sites such as Palmyra and Hatra, the IS also actively targeted the religious sites of various minority communities: Shia mosques, Christian churches and Yezidi temples were systematically desecrated and destroyed.

The violence and heritage destruction unleashed by groups such as the IS prompted international condemnation and saw various state parties and multilateral institutions launch initiatives to preserve and reconstruct the heritage sites of Syria and Iraq. While such efforts are undoubtedly well-intentioned, they are underpinned by a problematic assumption: that the protection and reconstruction of heritage in times of conflict is a normative good that can help minimize security threats, re-establish social cohesion and foster peace. While the notion that heritage protection inherently fosters peace is shared by several state parties and multilateral institutions (Foradori et al., 2018), is embedded in various legal frameworks (Lixinski, 2019; Lostal, 2017) and is an intellectual orthodoxy in much scholarly writing (Rush, 2010; Weiss and Connelly, 2019), it has not been held up to empirical scrutiny. Among its most prominent advocates are key multilateral institutions concerned with the promotion of global peace, such as UNESCO. A key component of UNESCO’s mission has been to preserve, protect and reconstruct heritage sites of ‘outstanding universal value’ in the belief that such sites hold the capacity to promote shared understandings of the past as a pathway to a tolerant and peaceful future (Meskell, 2018). Today, UNESCO remains resolute that heritage protection and reconstruction is a key antidote to conflict and division. To cite just one example, in the context of the IS destruction of heritage sites across Syria and Iraq, in 2017 then UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova stated that ‘safeguarding heritage is not only about protecting civilization, it is also vital for security, and plays a key role in restoring peace and resolving conflicts . . . defending heritage is a security imperative’ (UN, 2017).

However, no studies to date have scrutinized the norm of heritage as a tool for peace via a systematic analysis of the ways in which heritage protection can be utilized by militant actors not to promote social cohesion and end conflict, but to mobilize their members towards violent ends. Addressing this lacuna, this article focusses on the IS incursion across much of central and northern Iraq from mid-2014 and their deliberate targeting of Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak communities and their heritage sites. It then documents the ways in which the IS threat triggered the (re-)emergence and strengthening of several Shia militias who held mass recruitment drives across the country. There is now a considerable body of literature on the Shia militias of Iraq, the extent to which they are backed by the regional powerhouse of Iran’s Shia theocracy, the threat they pose to the integrity of the Iraqi state, their long-term consequences for the sectarian polarization of the Middle East (Arif, 2019; Isakhan, 2020; Smyth, 2014), and their violent retribution against Sunni Arab civilians for the crimes of the IS (Human Rights Watch (HRW), 2015b, 2016). However, what is not adequately addressed in the existing literature about the Shia militias of Iraq are the ways in which various Shia clerics, militia leaders and popular artists have utilized the IS attacks on their key heritage sites to further their own agendas: to create entirely new militias, to recruit new members, to mobilize them to enter the conflicts and, in the worst examples, to conduct and justify horrific violence.

To demonstrate, this article includes a systematic analysis of four sets of primary sources. The first is the online propaganda produced by the IS, including their magazine, Dabiq,¹ which reveals the anti-Shia rhetoric of the IS and the ideology, which drove their destruction of Shia sacred sites across Iraq. The second and third set of source materials include meticulous records compiled by key international organizations that document the suffering of the Shia peoples of Iraq at the hands of the IS² and the Shia holy sites they destroyed.³ The fourth set of sources are produced by several Shia non-state actors, including: the fatwas (religious edicts) issued by prominent Shia religious clergymen; statements made by the leaders of key militias; the rousing orations and emotive songs performed by prominent Shia personalities; and the graphic propaganda films produced by various Shia non-state actors in which they explain their ideology and their motives for fighting the IS. Throughout these latter sources, we see that various Shia non-state actors invoked the need to protect Shia heritage sites to successfully recruit and mobilize the faithful to fight the IS and to defend Shia holy sites.

This article begins by situating the discussion within the extant literature on the intersection between heritage, politics and peace. It demonstrates that heritage is significant to the study of politics and International Relations because it plays a prominent role in inculcating a sense of belonging to a political community, because it can determine how one political community engages with another, and because the destruction of heritage in conflict is increasingly seen as a significant challenge to global security and the promotion of peace. Specifically, it documents the recent evolution and pervasive nature of the norm that the protection of heritage in complex (post-)conflict environments implicitly fosters peace and security. It then problematizes this norm by examining the statements made and actions taken by several key Shia non-state actors who utilized the cause of heritage protection to mobilize their cadres to fight the IS across Iraq. The article concludes by noting that being cognizant of the tensions between the norm of heritage protection as a pathway to peace and the ways in which this norm can be instrumentalized by militant actors towards violence and human rights abuses is critical to the efficacy of any effort to advance peace and protect heritage in conflict.

Heritage, politics and peace

‘Heritage’ is deeply contested and inherently political (Lowenthal, 1985; Smith, 2006). To label something heritage is contentious: what is deemed heritage, who identifies it, how is it engaged with and by whom and how is it revered or celebrated? (Harrison, 2013; Lowenthal, 1985). For the purposes of this article, we define heritage as the tangible and intangible recognition of the past in the present. This recognition can take the form of a monument, museum or artefact, but can also be transmitted to future generations via landscapes, language, culture and art. While much has been written about the importance of recognizing intangible and natural heritage (Olwig and Lowenthal, 2006; Smith and Akagawa, 2009), this article limits its focus to tangible human-made cultural property which hold evidential, historical, aesthetic and/ or communal value for the relevant community (Isakhan, 2015).

Such heritage sites are significant to the study of politics and International Relations for at least three key reasons. First, heritage sites play a significant role in identity and belonging, serving as physical structures that enshrine the histories, customs and cultures of a given community. Recent centuries have seen a whole host or governments – from totalitarian regimes to liberal democracies – use the heritage of their respective nation state to develop a unifying national memory designed to engender degrees of collective identity and cohesion via the inculcation of a shared past (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992 (1983)). Underpinning this national identity is a dynamic and selective engagement with the past in which processes of remembering and forgetting help legitimate the nation state itself, its borders and sovereignty, its incumbent political elites, and the parameters of inclusion and exclusion (Gillis, 1994; Svensson, 2021). Beyond the nation state, heritage can also play a role in fostering transnational belonging, such as the promotion of pan-regional cultural heritage to advance a common ‘European’ identity across the EU (Kaasik-Krogerus, 2020) or the ways in which South African sites commemorating the Apartheid regime have been utilized to connect local suffering to the global struggle against racism and oppression (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019). Religious heritage sites – such as mosques, temples, churches, shrines and so on – can play a similar role. They not only provide the space where individuals connect with the divine and religious groups perform their distinct rituals and practices, but also serve as physical structures that signal a sense of belonging to a community of the faithful, connected across both temporal and spatial dimensions (Byrne, 2014; Verkaaik, 2014).

Second, as much recent International Relations scholarship has demonstrated, the ways in which a particular people or nation commemorate the past can affect contemporary global politics and perceptions of both national and international security (Danilova, 2015; Gustafsson, 2014). For example, heritage sites, museums and public rituals that commemorate the wars of the past can shape the foreign policy of the present, making certain security decisions such as to engage (or not to engage) in a specific conflict seem legitimate and natural (Åse and Wendt, 2021; Welland, 2017). In addition, heritage protection and restoration at both home and abroad can serve to further a state’s economic relations and geopolitical influence. Indeed, several states – as diverse as the United States, China, Japan and Turkey – maintain government departments dedicated to the monitoring, protection and reconstruction of heritage sites abroad. Such ‘soft power’ or ‘cultural diplomacy’ not only help shape political and cultural policies beyond a state’s borders and enhance geopolitical relations, they can also be used to obfuscate political failings at home, co-opt other states towards a specific outcome, or to mask other geostrategic ambitions (Akagawa, 2014; Luke and Kersel, 2013; Winter, 2020; Yanik and Subotic, 2021).

On the global stage, UNESCO serves as the foremost multilateral body concerned with heritage sites. This dates back to UNESCO’s founding in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, with its Constitution setting the lofty ambition that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed’ (UNESCO, 2020 (1945)). A key component of UNESCO’s mission – especially since the 1972 World Heritage Convention came into force (UNESCO, 1972) – has been to preserve, protect and reconstruct heritage sites of ‘outstanding universal value’ in the belief that doing so will promote mutual understanding between different communities and bring peace to war torn societies (Meskell, 2018). However, UNESCO’s capacity to be effective in preserving or reconstructing heritage has become increasingly mired in the complex bureaucratic machinery of global consensus-making and the extent to which debates over heritage have become a proxy for the broader geopolitical agendas of Member States (Bertacchini et al., 2016; Meskell and Isakhan, 2020).

This brings us to a third reason that heritage is significant to the study of politics and International Relations, namely, that the destruction of heritage sites has become an increasingly common feature of modern conflict and is therefore seen as a significant challenge to global security. Indeed, the 20th and early 21st centuries are replete with examples in which militant forces have deliberately targeted and destroyed heritage sites in conflict – from the mass devastation of the First and Second World Wars, through ‘cultural cleansing’ campaigns in China and Cambodia, civil war in Lebanon, ethno-religious wars in the Balkans, US-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and down to ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Mali, Ethiopia and elsewhere. In response, a number of state parties and multilateral institutions have launched initiatives to protect and reconstruct heritage in complex (post-)conflict contexts, underpinned by the increasingly pervasive norm that doing so inherently fosters peace and security.

One example of such initiatives is the fact that in recent years several states have developed significant programmes to ensure that their military forces protect heritage in conflict. In the United States, heritage professionals work with the Department of Defence to support troops in protecting heritage during military operations; in the United Kingdom, a specialist Cultural Property Protection Unit has been created within the Armed Forces; and similar heritage protection programmes now exist in the militaries of many significant world powers (Foradori et al., 2018; Rush, 2010). On the global stage, some have called for the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine to be expanded from the protection of human life to significant heritage sites and cultural assets (Lenzerini, 2016; Weiss and Connelly, 2019) and for some form of ‘Cultural Peacekeeping’ force to be integrated into international operations (Foradori and Rosa, 2017). In 2016, UNESCO partnered with the Italian Government to create a specialized unit designed to protect cultural property in conflict, later nick-named the ‘Blue Helmets for Culture’ (UNESCO, 2016). However, some scholars have expressed grave reservations about the use of military forces to protect heritage sites in conflict, highlighting that such forces would likely face significant ethical dilemmas like privileging the protection of heritage sites over the loss of human life (Frowe and Matravers, 2019; Matthes, 2018). Nonetheless, UNESCO has insisted that such forces are ‘an essential element in ensuring sustainable peace and development, and that participation and access to culture and its living expressions can help strengthen people’s resilience and sustain their efforts to live through and overcome crisis’ (UNESCO, 2017).

Another initiative has been to link the looting of heritage sites to the funding of terrorist groups and therefore to frame the destruction of heritage as a key challenge to global security. For example, from mid-2014 evidence began to emerge that the IS and other belligerents were systematically looting important archaeological sites across Syria and Iraq (Casana, 2015; Casana and Panahipour, 2014) and raising significant revenue via the trafficking of artefacts onto the international black market for antiquities (Keller, 2015; Losson, 2017). This led to the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2199, which included reference to the fact that the trafficking of antiquities funded terrorist activities (UNSC, 2015). In discussing the resolution, then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated that the protection of heritage sites ‘must be central to our strategy for tackling violent extremism, building peace and restoring security’ (Ki-moon, 2016). This led to further developments at the UNSC, such as the 2017 adoption of Resolution 2347 which is the first and only resolution dedicated exclusively to the security implications of the destruction and trafficking of heritage in conflict (UNSC, 2017). Theoretically, the unanimous adoption of Resolution 2347 means that the intentional destruction of heritage sites is now considered to have a similar status as other threats to global peace, such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As Peter Wilson, the British Ambassador to the UN who chaired the UNSC meeting stated at the time, Resolution 2347 meant that the UNSC would now need to respond to heritage destruction ‘with the same intensity and the same unity of purpose as any other threat to international peace and security’ (Wilson, 2017).

Another example of recent global responses to heritage destruction in conflict has been renewed efforts to prosecute the perpetrators under international law. Most recently, in 2016 Ahmed Al-Mahdi, a leader of the terrorist group Ansar al-Dine, was sentenced to 9 years in prison in a landmark case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for ordering the destruction of 10 religious and historic sites (Sufi shrines) in Timbuktu in Mali in 2012 (Ba, 2020; Vrdoljak, 2018). In the first ever case before the ICC to rest solely on charges of heritage destruction, the prosecution argued that the sentencing of Al-Mahdi may itself ‘further peace and reconciliation in Northern Mali by alleviating the victims’ moral suffering through acknowledgement of the significance of the destruction’ (ICC, 2016). However, as several scholars have noted, there remain several inherent complexities in prosecuting heritage destruction at the hands of non-state actors such as Ansar al-Dine or the IS (Cunliffe et al., 2016; Lostal, 2017).

Finally, the IS destruction of heritage sites across Syria and Iraq has also seen renewed interest in the role that the reconstruction of heritage sites may play in establishing sustainable development and (post-)conflict reconciliation (Alsalloum and Brown, 2019; Lostal and Cunliffe, 2016). These debates reach at least as far back as the aftermath of the Balkans conflict of the 1990s when several major initiatives were launched to reconstruct heritage sites such as the Stari Most bridge in Mostar. However, such efforts have been criticized as a carefully stage managed affair designed as a symbol of peace and stability in the centre of a city still riven with tension (Forde, 2016). Today, several sites across the Balkans present ongoing challenges to both the commemoration of the conflict and the maintenance of peace (Björkdahl and Selimovic, 2016; Ejdus, 2021). More recently, following the defeat of the IS in Iraq, UNESCO’s Director General, Audrey Azoulay, announced a new flagship project to ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ (UNESCO, 2018). According to her, the project was specifically designed to coordinate several initiatives to reconstruct the Old City and other key religious and historical sites in and around Mosul with the express purpose of driving ‘community reconciliation and peace building through the recovery of the living environment and rehabilitation of the city’s heritage sites’ (Azoulay, 2018). While admirable, it remains to be seen whether heritage reconstruction can actually play a meaningful long-term role in fostering peace and reconciliation in the deeply divided society left in the wake of the IS (Isakhan and Meskell, 2019).

As the above makes clear, the notion that the protection and reconstruction of heritage in complex (post-)conflict contexts can foster peace and security has achieved the status of orthodoxy in many quarters, shared by multilateral institutions and state bodies, and leading to the creation of specialized military units, the adoption of new resolutions at the UNSC, the prosecution of perpetrators at the ICC, and the launch of major UNESCO-led reconstruction projects. However, what is problematic here is that this norm has not been held up to empirical scrutiny via an analysis of the ways in which key actors can instrumentalize heritage protection not to further peace and security, but to mobilize their forces to engage in conflict. Addressing this lacuna, the remainder of this article examines the ways in which various Shia religio-political leaders have utilized the IS attacks on their key heritage sites to create entirely new militias, to recruit members, to mobilize them to enter the conflicts and, in the worst examples, to conduct and justify human rights abuses and violence. It begins by documenting the anti-Shia rhetoric that underpinned the IS attacks on the Shia people and their heritage sites in Iraq from mid-2014.

The IS attacks on Shia people and their heritage sites

Throughout its vast propaganda materials, the IS seeks to articulate the historical, political and theological framework that underpins their brand of violent jihadist terrorism (Dabiq, 2015a, 2015b). The IS reserves particular vehemence for the Shia sect of Islam, which they view as an unacceptable innovation, and IS propaganda therefore frequently refers to the Shia as heretics, apostates and idolaters (Dabiq, 2014–2015, 2014b). For example, Issue 13 of Dabiq is specifically dedicated to the Shia and includes a 14-page feature article which cites several historical and contemporary Sunni jihadists who have condemned the Shia and called for open confrontation with them. The article also features several provocative images, including Shia faithful gathered at a shrine with the caption, ‘The shirk [idolatry] of the Rafidah [a derogatory word for Shia meaning “rejecter of the truth”] includes grave-worship’ (Dabiq, 2016: 36). Another features an image of Shia men self-flagellating during a public religious ceremony with the caption: ‘A Rafidi procession of shirk’ (Dabiq, 2016: 37). The Shia are also condemned for visiting the graves of Shia saints: ‘The Rāfidah prostrate to graves and circumambulate them. They supplicate the buried and seek intercession from them. Their hearts are attached to them more than Allah! This shirkī apostasy is something of which all of them . . . are guilty’ (Dabiq, 2016: 36). The article finally calls for open confrontation with the Shia: ‘They are mushrik [idolators] apostates who must be killed wherever they are to be found, until no Rāfidī walks on the face of earth’ (Dabiq, 2016: 45). In addition, the attacks by the IS on Shia sacred spaces in Iraq are dutifully recorded and celebrated in various issues of Dabiq. For example, Issue 2 includes a four-page photo report that begins with dramatic images of the complete obliteration of a Shia mosque in Mosul. Overleaf, a bearded man stands in front of a shrine talking to an audience with the caption: ‘A soldier of the Islamic State clarifies to the people the obligation to demolish the tombs’ (Dabiq, 2014a: 15).

The threats to Shia people and their heritage sites found in the pages of Dabiq were very real. While it is beyond the scope of this article to document the full scale and scope of the horrors unleashed by the IS against the Shia people and their holy sites, it is worth briefly highlighting the IS targeting of two non-Arab Shia minority communities of central and northern Iraq who were systematically targeted by the IS from mid-2014. The first are the Turkmen, Iraq’s third largest ethnic group (after Arabs and Kurds) made up of the descendants of waves of migration by Turkic peoples into Iraq, especially during the Ottoman Empire. They speak a local dialect of Turkish and while the majority are Sunni Muslims, a significant minority of around 30%–40% are Shia. They are largely centred in and around key cities such as Kirkuk (Kirkuk province), Tal Afar (Nineveh province) and Amerli (Saladin province), as well as several smaller villages across the three provinces (Oğuzlu, 2004; Taylor, 2004). The second are the Shabaks, a small minority clustered around some 35 villages east of Mosul in the Hamdaniyya district of the Nineveh Plains (Nineveh province). The majority follow a Shia religious offshoot with historical links to specific Sufi orders and speak a distinct language, Shabaki, that is closely related to the northwestern Iranian group of languages. The ethnicity of the Shabaks is often debated with competing claims that they are Kurds, Turkmen or a distinct ethnic group (Leezenberg, 1994; van Zoonen and Wirya, 2017).

With the IS incursion across central and northern Iraq from mid-2014, the Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabaks have suffered persecution, violence and the destruction of their heritage sites. For example, in mid-June 2014 the IS launched a 3-month siege on the Shia Turkmen town of Amerli as well as several small Shia Turkmen villages just north of the town. In Amerli, the IS executed more than 600 Shia inmates at the local prison who were loaded into trucks, driven to a nearby ravine and shot. In the neighbouring villages, the IS executed a further eight Shia Turkmen before they looted and burned houses as well as at least two Shia religious hussainiyas (a congregation hall used for various religious ceremonies) (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 2015). Meanwhile, in late June 2014, the IS also attacked two Shia Turkmen farming villages just north of Mosul known as Guba and Shireekhan (Nineveh province). Here, the IS ordered 950 families to leave the villages, kidnapped and later executed around 75 people, ransacked homes and farms, and then hoisted their black flag over several Shia mosques and shrines (HRW, 2014a, 2014b). They went on to detonate explosives at several Shia holy sites in the two villages, completely destroying them. In Guba this included two significant Shia shrines – the Shrine of Abbas and the Mosque of Al-Ridha; in Shireekhan, the IS destroyed the Mosque of Imam Husayn as well as the Al-Zahraa Mosque (ASOR, 2015: 92–95).

Paralleling this, in late June 2014, the IS also attacked the town of Tal Afar, home to a significant Shia Turkmen population some 60 km west of Mosul. After the IS conquered the town, they tried local Shia in makeshift Sharia law courts, including those set up in two Shia mosques that were converted for this purpose and where captives were forced to ‘repent’ their crimes against Islam (HRW, 2014a). Some 90% of Tal Afar’s Shia Turkmen population were forced to leave, leading to a mass exodus of some 125,000 people (HRW, 2014a). Over the following 3 days (24–26 June 2014), the IS destroyed at least 11 mosques and 3 shrines in Tal Afar, the majority of which were affiliated with the Shia faith (ASOR, 2015: 54–84). Minarets were toppled, mosques were reduced to rubble by massive explosions and shrines were levelled with bulldozers. Several of the sites destroyed by the IS in Tal Afar were highly significant to the local Shia population, such as: the Mosque of Imam Ali; a shrine dedicated to Aqeel ibn Abi Talib; a mosque associated with Abbas; and the Mosque of Imam Sadiq (ASOR, 2015: 54–84; HRW, 2014b).

In terms of the IS targeting of the Shia Shabak community, this began when the IS took control of Mosul in June 2014 and ordered the minority to leave the city within 72 hours or be killed (United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI)/OHCHR, 2014). Their houses were marked with the Arabic letter ra (for Rafida) and their property was looted by IS militants. Some 1500 Shabak families were displaced to the Nineveh Plains where they endured further persecution when the IS advanced. HRW (2014a) reported that between June and July 2014, some 83 Shabaks were kidnapped from villages around Mosul and several of their corpses were later discovered in mass graves. As just one example, when the IS conquered the small Shabak village of Omarkan in July 2014, they conducted a roll call of all Shia living in the village, ordering them to leave before Friday prayers (HRW, 2014a). They then kidnapped 35 civilians before pillaging the houses and farms of Shia Shabaks and stealing weapons, livestock, vehicles and valuables. The IS militants also damaged at least two local Shia sites, including setting fire to a shrine dedicated to Abbas (HRW, 2014a). When the IS militants returned on Friday, they announced that all remaining Shia Shabaks in the village were to be killed (UNAMI/OHCHR, 2014). Across the many Shabak villages that the IS conquered from mid-2014, they are thought to have targeted and destroyed 29 Shia mosques, shrines and hussainiya’s, including those dedicated to significant Shia historical and religious figures such as the Al-Hasan Al-Mujtaba mosque and a shrine dedicated to Iman Husayn in the village of Ortakharab and a shrine dedicated to Abbas in the village of Alabbasiya (Iraqi Society for Human Rights (ISHR), 2015). In March 2015, the IS destroyed an additional four Shia sites in the Shabak village of Manarat, including a local mosque dedicated to Imam Ali (UNAMI/OHCHR, 2015).

Shia responses: heritage protection, militia mobilization and violence

The IS persecution of Shia Arab populations and their destruction of key religious sites in Iraq from mid-2014 prompted a furious response from various Shia actors. A key turning point came on June 13, 2014 when Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is typically regarded as a voice for moderation and restraint, issued a fatwa (religious edict) announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS. He asserted that it is ‘the religious and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to hold it to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites’ (al-Sistani, 2014).⁴ Particularly relevant here is the reference in Sistani’s fatwa to the protection of heritage, via his call for the Shia faithful to rise up and protect the ‘holy sites’.

Other Shia clerics drew more explicitly on the rich historical catalogue of Shia suffering at the hands of Sunni forces to justify the need to protect the Shia people and their heritage. As just one example, the Iraqi cleric Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi issued his own fatwa in which he called on Iraq’s Shia to launch a ‘defensive jihad’ against the IS. He not only called upon the faithful to protect the Shia holy sites but also compared those martyred in pursuit of this goal with Imam Husayn and his followers at Karbala (al-Najafi, 2015). This refers back to a defining moment in Islamic history when the leader of the Shia community and the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Husayn ibn Ali, challenged the legitimacy of the Sunni Umayyad Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya. Yazid’s forces eventually defeated Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Husayn was beheaded and many of his family and companions were slaughtered, including his brother and standard-bearer, al-Abbas ibn Ali (Abbas). Today, the Shia commemorate the Battle of Karbala at the annual Ashura procession, which includes self-flagellations and public re-enactments of the battle. It has also come to symbolize the Shia struggle against oppression at the hands of Sunni forces and a commitment to the pursuit of justice in the face of tyranny (Nakash, 2003 [1994]; Nasr, 2007 [2006]).

The mixture of historical narrative and religious obligation in the above fatwa’s galvanized many of Iraq’s Shia and fuelled their efforts to defend Shia people and heritage sites from the threat of the IS. Within days of Sistani’s fatwa around 40 Iraqi Shia militias had (re-)formed and were hosting mass recruitment drives across Iraq. As many as 100,000 Shia Arab men enlisted virtually overnight and surged north to stanch the IS advance. To present a coherent front in the battle against the IS, the various Shia militias banded together under the auspices of the al-Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units, PMU). Focussing specifically on the Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak militias that formed part of the PMUs, we can see how they have drawn heavily upon a rich catalogue of Shia historical and religious symbolism in their recruitment drives and operations to defend Iraq and its Shia holy sites.

For example, in response to the siege on the town of Amerli from June 2014, several small clusters of armed Shia Turkmen men banded together to form the Turkmen Brigades (al-Hashd al-Turkmani). Over time, this poorly trained and armed militia came to serve as the 16th Brigade of the much larger and more organized PMUs, working most closely with the powerful Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militia known as Munathamat Badr (Badr Organisation). From very early on, the Turkmen Brigades expressed that a key driver behind their formation and fight against the IS was not only the suffering of Shia Turkmen people, but also the threat posed by the IS to key Shia heritage sites. Perhaps the clearest indication of this comes from the various evocative songs written and performed by popular vocalists to inspire and mobilize the Turkmen Brigades. Such songs – which take the form of a nashīd (religious chant or song) – utilize a colloquial style to fuse historical grievances, religious rhetoric and contemporary politics into a coherent call to arms. A music video of one such nashīd uploaded to YouTube in April 2016 features dramatic scenes with heavily armed members of the Turkmen Brigades dressed in military fatigues and engaged in live battle scenes against the IS. The lyrics clearly identify that the fatwa of Ayatollah Sistani fuelled Iraq’s Shia Turkmen to defend their territories and sacred sites. The singer recites:

God helps us and may Imam Ali never forget us . . . We are the Turkmen [of Iraq] and we are the followers of ahl al-bayt [the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad] . . . We have been under injustice for years. We follow Ali’s path . . . We already learnt how to carry weapons and how to use them in battle. The fatwas of the grand marja [Ayatollah Sistani] is the cure for all of our injuries . . . When Sayyid Sistani commands us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS . . . We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities. (Nashid, 2016)

Another propaganda film released by the Turkmen Brigades in June 2016 is steeped in Shia religious and historical symbolism, connecting the contemporary war against the IS to seminal historical religious conflicts such as the Battle of Karbala. The video features frontline footage of the Turkmen Brigades engaged in several operations against the IS. Dubbed over the footage, a nashīd includes the lyrics: ‘We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are Husayn’s supporters with their hearts and minds. We give the oath of allegiance to ahl al-bayt by our blood’ (TB, 2016).

Paralleling the above, in June 2014 some 1–1500 Shia Shabak men formed a militia known as Liwa al-Shabak (Shabak Brigades) and sometimes referred to as the Quwat Sahl Ninawa (Nineveh Plains Forces (NPF)). As with the Turkmen militia, the Shabak Brigades have since been amalgamated into the PMUs, serving as the 30th Brigade and working under the auspices of Badr. The Shabak Brigades have also produced their own emotive propaganda in which their fighters speak about the significance of Sistani’s fatwa in mobilizing them to defend the Shia and their holy shrines (Smyth, 2015). As one example, a film uploaded onto the Quwat Sahl Ninawa YouTube channel in May 2016 shows heavily armed members of the Shabak Brigades chanting: ‘Seyyed Ali Sistani is like a crown on our head. We swear on your eyes. . . The Shabak are with you. . . The entire nation is with you. We love you Seyyed [Sistani]’ (NPF, 2016).

Throughout such propaganda, the Shabak Brigades also emphasized the need to protect Shia heritage sites to recruit and mobilize young Shia Shabak men to fight against the IS. For example, another video produced by the YouTube account of Quwat Sahl Ninawa in October 2015 features footage inside a Shabak Brigade base and shows members engaged in Shia prayers, traditional dances and songs, and several pro-Shia chants. It also shows small numbers of armed militiamen listening to the speeches of their leaders before travelling to the front lines to fight against the IS. Here, the Shabak leaders invoke the key religious themes and historical events of Shiism to motivate the men to fight. For example, one refers explicitly to the Battle of Karbala, and compares today’s IS militants with the Umayyad forces who attempted to crush the fledgling Shia community. He emphasizes that the Shabak Brigades of today must fight with the same honour and vigour of the early Shia community. ‘O’ children of Yazid! Listen to me. I warn you. We are Ali’s followers. We are Shias of Ali. I swear to God, we will fight you. We will kill you’ (NPF, 2015a). Behind him, a large poster of Imam Ali and Imam Husayn adorns the wall. At the end of the film, a member of the Shabak Brigades explains that ‘Nobody can harm [the shrines of] Imam Husayn and Imam Ali. Our religious authorities protect the holy sites’ (NPF, 2015a).⁵

A similar video released via the YouTube account of Quwat Sahl Ninawa in June 2015 documents the rigorous military training undertaken by the Shabak Brigades. The film also features speeches by leaders of the Brigade as well as images of Shabak religious clergymen visiting with the militia. Dubbed over the footage, a singer recites a nashīd which draws on key Shia religio-political motifs to mobilize the militia to fight against the IS. He sings,

O’ Da’esh [IS], we warn you. We are Shabaki and this is our country. We are Shias. You should quickly leave our land. We warn you of our heroes. We are full of ability and honor. We defend our land and our borders. We are the Shabak Brigade. We will quickly take our lands back. We are the followers of Ali, and we never give up. When an oppressor tries to kill us, we fight back. Today, we all stand up and fight with honor. We never let you humiliate us. We fight with honor. We never give up . . . We have given the oath of allegiance to Abbas. (NPF, 2015c)

The film also features footage from several frontline battles between the Shabak Brigades and the IS. Towards the end of the video, grainy footage shows a member of the Shabak Brigades proudly planting a pro-Shia flag in the ground. As the camera pans down, we see that he has placed it directly over the corpse of a defeated IS fighter. The flag features images of Imam Ali and Imam Husayn as well as a golden Shia shrine (NPF, 2015c).

As has been documented above, the powerful religio-political rhetoric that underpinned calls to protect Shia heritage played a critical role in mobilizing the Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak militias of Iraq. However, what is most problematic for our purposes here is that the cause of heritage protection was instrumentalized by these Shia actors not to advance peace and stability, but to recruit and deploy Shia volunteers in conflict and, subsequently, to engage in acts of violence and other human rights abuses. For example, the PMUs – including the Turkmen and Shabak units – have been accused of conducting reprisal attacks against Sunni Arab civilians, including persecuting civilians and destroying heritage sites (Amnesty International (AI), 2014; HRW, 2015b). In one such instance, following the end of the IS siege on Amerli in August 2014, the Turkmen Brigades are suspected of having participated in revenge attacks for the crimes of the IS against innocent Sunni Arab civilians. They raided at least 47 Sunni villages and neighbourhoods around Amerli, abducting at least 11 men, looting civilian property, burning homes and businesses, damaging mosques and using explosives to demolish entire villages (HRW, 2015a). Similar incidents followed the liberation of the Shia Turkmen majority town of Tuz Khurmatu (Saladin province) from late 2014 where the Turkmen Brigades are accused of demolishing, burning and looting Sunni Arab property in apparent revenge attacks for the crimes of the IS (Rudaw, 2017).

For their part, the Shabak Brigades have developed a reputation for deliberately intimidating locals and for preventing the return of minority communities to their traditional homelands across the Nineveh Plains. For example, from October 2017, the Shabak Brigades took over as the local security forces in the town of Bashiqa (Nineveh governorate). Prior to the IS onslaught, Bashiqa had been home to a complex ethno-religious mix of Yezidis, Christians, Shabaks, Kurds and Sunni Arabs. The Shabak Brigades have since been accused of violence, the seizure and looting of property, intimidating locals, and corruption – as well as deliberately disrupting efforts by non-Shia minority communities to return to the town (Gaston, 2017; Knights, 2019). The Shabak Brigades has also been accused of looting and damaging Christian homes in Qaraqosh (HRW, 2017) and of deliberately setting up their headquarters in the once Christian-majority town of Bartella (Knights, 2019). These efforts have not only exacerbated tensions between different minority communities but also led to accusations that the Shabak Brigades, on behalf of the PMUs, are engaged in systematic demographic engineering, part of a broader plan to ‘Shia-fy’ the territories re-taken after the defeat of the IS (Gaston, 2017).

In conducting such acts of violence, destruction and forced dispossession, the various Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak militias of Iraq have explicitly drawn on the rich cache of Shia heritage. Many of the battlefield cries, poems, songs and mottoes of the militias are steeped in evocative sectarian symbolism expressly invoking the Shia suffering of the past to call on the Shia of today to defend their territory, people and heritage sites. For example, one video released in April 2015 shows an operation of the Turkmen Brigades to liberate the Turkmen village of Bashir (Kirkuk governorate) from IS control. The clip shows a number of Shia Turkmen militants armed with rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They chant ‘We are here for you, O’ Husayn!’ as they shoot rockets into the areas under the control of the IS (Tuzhurmatu, 2015). Similarly, a film produced by Quwat Sahl Ninawa and uploaded onto YouTube in October 2015 documents the joint operations conducted by the Shabak Brigades in cooperation with other PMU-affiliated Shia militias to liberate the areas controlled by the IS. The video shows a number of young Shabak militiamen on the frontlines, dressed in military fatigues and heavily armed, chanting ‘We are Shabak! We are here for you, O’ Husayn!’ (NPF, 2015b).

Conclusion

The mass heritage destruction wrought by the IS across Syria and Iraq triggered several initiatives led by state actors and multilateral institutions to address the plight of heritage in conflict. These include the creation of specialized military units designed to protect heritage in times of war, UNSC Resolutions that prohibited the looting of archaeological sites and the active desecration of heritage in conflict, the prosecution of perpetrators in groundbreaking trials at the ICC, and significant UNESCO-led heritage reconstruction projects. However, as this article has demonstrated, such initiatives are largely premised on normative assumptions about the role that heritage protection and reconstruction can play in fostering (post-)conflict reconciliation, stability and peace. To problematize this increasingly pervasive norm, this article has juxtaposed it against the response of key Shia actors to the IS targeting of their communities and heritage sites. It has catalogued the ways key Shia elites – from religious clergymen, militia leaders and seminal artists – drew on Shia history, symbols, myths and religious doctrine to recruit tens of thousands of members and mobilize them to protect their heritage sites from destruction at the hands of the IS. Focussing specifically on the case of the Shia Turkmen and Shia Shabak communities, this article has also demonstrated the ways that the urgent need to protect heritage justified the formation of entirely new militias who declared the centrality of heritage protection to their mandate, legitimized their entry into the conflict and served as a catalyst for further violence and human rights abuses.

The utilization of heritage protection to mobilize these violent non-state actors is not only deeply problematic but stands in stark contrast to the pervasive global norm that the protection of heritage in complex (post-)conflict environments can foster peace and reconciliation. Indeed, when international actors (as well-intentioned as they may be) instrumentalize heritage to promote peace, they reduce the deeply contested and inherently political nature of heritage down to simplistic tropes. This is ironic given that heritage is typically valued – and fought over – precisely because of its complex origins and nuanced role in the present. More to the point, such simplistic tropes can by cynically deployed by violent actors not to advance the case of peace, but to mobilize their cadres to fight, therefore escalating the conflict and exposing local populations and their heritage sites to further waves of violence and destruction. Instead, future initiatives to utilize heritage to advance peace must be cognizant of the complex symbolic, discursive, ideological and physical environment in which heritage protection, destruction and reconstruction takes place. ‘Heritage’ ought not to be thought of as implicitly fostering ‘peace’, but instead as a key part of an ongoing and dynamic engagement with the past – a past that is itself littered with periods of war and destruction as well as moments of relative peace and inter-communal solidarity. This would be a small step in the ongoing process of developing appropriate analytical tools and policy responses to interpret and then mitigate against the destruction of heritage in conflict.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Polis research network and the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia. The authors would also like to acknowledge the insightful comments and suggestions of our colleagues, Lynn Meskell, Ihsan Yilmaz and Dara Conduit, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal.

Funding

The author(s) disclose receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The Australian Department of Defence and the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE120100315). The views expressed in this article do not reflect those of Defence or Government policy.

ORCID iD

Benjamin Isakhan

Notes

Author biographies

Benjamin Isakhan is Professor of International Politics and Founding Director of Polis, a research network for Politics and International Relations in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia. He is also an Adjunct Senior Research Associate, Department of Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. [ Email: benjamin.isakhan@deakin.edu.au]

Ali Akbar is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. [ Email: ali.akbar@unimelb.edu.au]

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