Just two days after six Palestinians were killed by an (almost certainly accidental) explosion in one of the smugglers’ tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, this morning I woke up to the news that ten to twenty Turkish civil rights activists had been killed by Israeli forces whilst in the process of trying to convey 10,000 tons of aid to the port of Gaza via a flotilla of ships organized by the ‘Free Gaza’ Group. By lunchtime the BBC was talking about little else.

This outcome, tragic as it is, is not a complete surprise. Since the ships set sail from Cyprus a few days ago, Israeli authorities have repeatedly affirmed their intention to prevent the aid from breaching the naval blockade, viewing the mission as direct provocation. The flotilla, which has hardly concealed its movements – quite the contrary - has consequently been steering itself on a steady but inevitable collision course with the Israeli Defence Force.  Less inevitable was that the confrontation would end so bloodily. ‘Free Gaza’, an association of multi-national pro-Palestinian human rights groups have staged a number of maritime aid missions to Gaza, only few of which have actually reached their destination in the past, but all of which have been peaceful, and the group notes in its mission statement:

We want to break the siege of Gaza. We want to raise international awareness about the prison-like closure of the Gaza Strip and pressure the international community to review its sanctions policy and end its support for continued Israeli occupation…We have not and will not ask for Israel’s permission. It is our intent to overcome this brutal siege through civil resistance and non-violent direct action, and establish a permanent sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world.

“Free Gaza” spokesperson Greta Berlin told the Guardian last week with reference to the latest mission that "The previous boats were making a statement   these boats will be making a real impact," raising questions as to quite what they hoped to achieve. 10,000 tons of aid is a lot to waste, after all, when the primary objective is to raise international awareness and the chances of delivering the aid are slim. Israel will doubtless claim that if the activists truly had the humanitarian interests of the people of Gaza at heart, they would have found an alternative way to channel the aid through Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli spokesmen have for their part claimed that the resistance staged in the latest incident was hardly non-violent, as Israeli commandoes were greeted by militant opposition, knives and clubs as they boarded one of the ships early this morning.

 

Whatever the circumstances, Israel faces immediate difficulties in accounting for this death toll.  And, in view of early reports that the victims are predominantly Turkish nationals, these difficulties will only be compounded in the longer term by increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Israel and its erstwhile ally, Turkey. Once a lone friend to Israel amidst a hostile Muslim world, Turkey still shares immense trading links with Israel, but diplomatically, bilateral relations between the two countries have flagged since the 2009 Israeli war on Gaza. In what many see as an attempt to hive off domestic Islamist opposition, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan personally signaled his growing distaste for Israeli policies to Shimon Peres at the Davos summit last year. If that was a bad time for Israel to lose its regional ally, then Turkey too has suffered over the last year from this deterioration in the form of US disapproval.

Hamas may well be able to salvage some sort of PR victory from yesterday’s events, but other than that, it is difficult to see any winners. Israel faces the world’s condemnation; Turkey has lost at least a dozen nationals; both countries are set to lose from a collapse in their alliance; “Free Gaza” has perhaps foolishly frittered away the chance to deliver aid, and the Gazaens get nothing.

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In June 2006 the infamous leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, was killed in US airstrikes north of Baghdad. Amidst the general excitement, President Bush announced at the time that the killing was "a severe blow to Al Qaeda and… a significant victory in the war on terror."  

In these post-Bush days, nobody says too much about the War on Terror, although the hunt for terrorists continues apace. In fact, with regard to Iraq, US forces have long been fighting against an ‘insurgency’ as opposed to a ‘terrorist campaign’ in common parlance, even if the insurgency is driven by terrorists…. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has been less troubled by what it apparently considers to be semantic concerns.

Yesterday it was announced that Zarqawi’s two replacements as the top leaders of al-Qa’ida in Iraq; Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been killed by a US/
Iraqi rocket attack near Tikrit.  Nuri al-Maliki described the killings as "a quality blow breaking the back of al-Qa’ida”, whilst US vice President Joe Biden said they were a "potentially devastating blow" to al-Qa’ida in Iraq. And so they are... potentially.

Biden’s relatively cautious welcome to the news reflects the sea of change in the attitude towards combating terrorism in Iraq over the past few years, and the recognition that the very amorphousness of al-Qa’ida has enabled it to produce new figureheads to replace defeated ones – even if they are not entirely real (the existence of al-Baghdadi was long questioned). Of course, dynamics in Iraq have changed: it is no longer the primary theatre for jihad, and as such has lost appeal to many ardent jihadis. But irrespective of this, many political commentators suspect that the leadership of al-Qa’ida in Iraq is of limited importance.  

In the aftermath of the US confirming the killings yesterday, Reuters rapidly collected some feedback from political analysts to the news. These included Gareth Stansfield from Chatham House, Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Centre, Jeremy Binnie, editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, and Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group. Their respective views draw attention to the nuanced strengths and weaknesses of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and the Iraqi government itself, but overall reflect a careful hedging of bets on the significance of al-Baghdadi’s and al-Masri’s deaths. One view that does come across loud and clear is that right now, their deaths are overshadowed by the post-electoral Iraqi political situation. As Peter Harling notes, “the next government is the talk of the town”; and personally, I think that’s how it should be.

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Not so many years ago, al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi franchise, the Islamic State of Iraq, was enthusiastically announcing that Iraq would serve as the launching ground for imminent jihad to liberate Palestine. And as recently as last year, in the wake of the January 2009 Israeli war on Gaza, al-Qai’da central leaders Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were refreshing the dream of an al-Qa’ida takeover in Gaza.

Within Gaza, where the Hamas leadership has consistently condemned the al-Qa’ida message, such rhetoric must always have seemed rather fantastical. Hamas gained substantive public support for its resistance to the Israeli offensive, in marked contrast to al-Qa’ida central, who contributed little more than words to the campaign. As for the possibility of a mass influx of foreign fighters into Gaza, well, it’s slim. Some Palestinian entrepreneurs are doing a roaring trade smuggling goods into Gaza from Egypt via the unsanctioned tunnels at Rafah, but the Egyptian authorities are scarcely likely to permit al-Qa’ida fighters across their borders into Gaza.

This is not to say that Hamas, or Gazans, can write off al-Qa’ida sympathizers in their midst.  Over the past few years a small stream of salafi-jihadi groups have emerged in Gaza. Many of them have proclaimed their allegiance to al-Qa’ida, though none so far has gained the movement’s lasting recognition. Most prominent amongst them were the Army of Islam – infamous for the kidnapping of British journalist Alan Johnson - and Jund Ansar Allah, both of whom developed a vociferous presence in the jihadi web forums and boasted of their rocket attacks on Israel, before being virtually wiped out in Hamas orchestrated massacres. In the case of the latter, Hamas responded to a declaration by the Jund Ansar Allah’s ideologue Sheikh Abdul Latif Mousa of the establishment of an Islamic Emirate in Palestine by bombarding the mosque where Mousa preached, leading to 24 people being killed, including 6 unarmed civilians, and Mousa blowing himself - and a Hamas operative - up with a suicide belt.

If Hamas has been quick in the past to crush unruly salafi-jihadi rivals, then the events of last week have again given cause for outsiders to question the leadership’s authority. Responding to Israeli airstrikes on Western Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks launched from there, Hamas insisted that it is doing its level best to restrain groups launching rocket attacks. And if this is true, one has to wonder just how much leverage they have.

In a prescient brief published last month by Professor Yezid Sayigh for the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, “Hamas Rule in Gaza: Three Years On”, Sayigh, whilst stressing that the Salafist threat should not be overestimated, notes that

…Gaza remains one huge prison, with massive unemployment and crushing poverty. Hamas has the wherewithal and the stamina to endure as a movement, but it runs the risk that, in promoting a discourse of armed resistance and martyrdom and in encouraging the Islamization of society – as a means both of containing dissent and of deflecting internal pressure to resume active hostilities with Israel – it inadvertently encourages its core constituency to defect to more militant Salafist groups that it does not control, and which increasingly vie for recognition by al-Qaeda as its local affiliates.”

Israel, for its part, has tended to play down the idea of an al-Qa’ida threat, preferring to point to the menace posed by Iran, who backs Hamas, and against whom Israel would like to garner more robust Western support.  But by pursuing the blockade and isolation of Gaza it may well be increasing salafi-extremism.  Whether or not al-Qa’ida fighters can penetrate the Gaza strip becomes a moot point: the threat of even more violent extremism does not come from interference by foreign al-Qa’ida affiliates: precisely the opposite. It comes from isolation.

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The Sadrists have done it again: risen from the ashes of political irrelevancy; put a spanner in the works of blossoming secular Iraqi democracy; reintroduced the spectre of Iranian interference in Iraqi politics…

Well, that's not quite the truth of the matter: the Sadrist's militant Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) wing has been down since Maliki's military offensives against it in Basra and Baghdad in 2008, but the political leadership has never been out and made a respectable showing in January 2009's provincial elections; even without the Sadrists, Iraqi politics would still be fraught with sectarian tensions; and Iran has shown ready in the past to back whichever Shi'a horse looks strongest and accepts its patronage.

Nonetheless, Friday's unanticipated announcement of electoral victory for Ayad Allawi's secular Iraqiyya Coalition could ring very hollow indeed over the coming months if he cannot bring the Sadrists on board. The radical Shi'a political bloc has taken 39 seats from a national total of 325 with the possibility of more after compensatory seats are allocated. This puts the Sadrists miles ahead of Badr and the Iraqi Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), their unlikely allies in the Iraqi National Alliance (INA). Overall the INA has 68 seats, and if this result appears to put them in a poor third place when compared with Allawi's 91 seats and Maliki's 89, for the Sadrists, it could be a dealmaker.

So what does all this mean?  The expectation of Sadrist success has understandably been seized upon with alarm by commentators. Anthony Shadid's piece in the NYT last week took the result as proof that Iraqi support for former exiles who collaborated with the US post 2003 had collapsed, and speculated that the Sadrists could usurp the position of the Kurdish bloc as kingmakers in the Iraqi parliament.

Ned Parker and Raheem Salman followed this with an article in the LA Times set amidst the supporters of victorious Sadrist politician Hakim Zamili in Sadr City, Baghdad. The article gently mocked the efforts of US forces over the preceding seven years by pointing out that Zamili was arrested just three years ago by US Forces on suspicion of orchestrating death squads through the Iraqi Health Ministry. These days, he is smiling at the prospect of imminent political influence.

But in truth, nobody really knows what it means yet - not even the Sadrists themselves. As the component parts of fragile coalitions scramble to realign themselves with the promise of key positions or stakes in key issues, there is no telling who will jump which way. Given the turbulent past of their relations, there is no evidence that the political glue currently binding the Sadrists to ISCI will hold; but after Maliki's treatment of the Sadrists over the past few years, an alliance between them and the State of Law with Maliki at the helm must appear equally if not even more unsavoury. A political arrangement that brought the Sadr bloc closer to Allawi's secular Coalition seems frankly hard to imagine, but in Iraqi politics, who is to tell?

At any rate,  alarming as the prospect of a strong Sadrist presence in the next Iraqi parliament may be, there was no good reason ever to believe that the Sadrists would not do relatively well in the elections. The socially and economically disaffected Shi'a populace who comprise the backbone of Sadr's support may have become disillusioned with the violence JAM militants brought to their communities, but what evidence have they been given that any of the other political groupings will fight their corner?

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Iraq's March 7 Parliamentary Elections seem to have crept up on the mainstream British press relatively unawares, certainly by comparison to the fanfare accompanying the 2005 elections.  If the Arab press has remained rather more attentive to Iraq's democracy experiment, then one aspect that in general seems to have been glaringly absent from critical discussion is the matter of post-electoral economic agendas.  More to the point; this aspect appears to have been largely absent from the contending coalitions' own manifestos.

A week on from the elections, preliminary results suggest that things are panning out pretty much as predicted in pre-electoral opinion polls conducted by Iraq’s National Media Centre. The Rule of Law Coalition of outgoing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki leads in seven of eighteen provinces; the Iraqiyya bloc headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi leads in four; the Iraqi National Alliance combining Sadrists and the ISCI is ahead in three southern provinces, whilst the Kurdish Alliance holds sway in the three northern Kurdish provinces.

Results for the disputed Kirkuk province hang in the balance with al-Iraqiyya and the Kurdish Alliance fighting it out. Despite widespread finger-pointing for suspected ballot box rigging and accusations made by some contenders against the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) for its partiality towards the Shi’a, these results are not hugely contentious.  However, nor are they particularly revealing or decisive of what is to come. Whichever Coalition emerges ahead, it will not be governing single-handedly.

The real nature of Iraq's future government will be decided over the coming months by a painstaking process of building fragile political alliances… and if the experience of Iraqi politics over the past 7 years has taught us anything, it is that some very surprising alliances may emerge.

This latest round of elections has brought to light positive and negative developments. On the upside, a 62% registered voter turnout despite a series of bombing attacks throughout the country during the campaign does credit to the electorate's optimism in the political system, and in contrast to 2005, this time the Sunni population have participated en masse. 

A further breakthrough in the proportional representation electoral system was the imposition of an open list of candidates, enabling voters to choose precisely whom they elect, and forcing candidates to individually pursue popular support. This measure, heavily influenced by popular demand, should ensure that some of the less savoury characters in Iraqi politics are not re-elected. 

On this note, the electoral campaign, following the trend of the 2009 Provincial Elections, has witnessed a dramatic decrease in sectarian rhetoric, and the emergence of more secular or mixed sect alliances. On the downside, the run-up to the elections was marred by boycotts and vetoes concerning the numbers of parliamentary seats and provisions for the election in the oil-rich Kirkuk (a matter remains heavily disputed between Iraqi Arabs and Kurds). 

The decision by the Accountability and Justice Commission to ban over 500 candidates on the grounds of their association to the former Ba'ath party just weeks before the elections was seen as an unambiguous attempt to target the secular parties and to derail the smooth-running of  the election.

Amidst all of these considerations, however, it strikes me that what has been surprisingly absent has been any serious campaigning by any of the leading Coalitions on the basis of serious economic reform. And this is worrying not only because it suggests that the parties do not have clear plans for how to encourage economic growth and to maximise their national budget, but also because it suggests that the Iraqi populace have not made demands on them to do so.

Despite the perception that the 2009 Provincial Elections punished those parties who, through a combination of incompetence and corruption,  had failed to provide people with basic services, the political groups do not appear to have taken these lessons on board in terms of economic agendas.  True; the Iraqi budget is beset by uncertainties; tied in part to donor contributions; in part to global oil revenues; and in part to the relative control exercised by provincial governorates over internal revenues.

Nonetheless, the party-political formulation of clear economic programmes and priorities is a vital component of functional democracies, and in the context of Iraq, one which is central to averting prolonged vulnerability to extremist tendencies within society.

Since 2003 Coalition Forces in Iraq frequently deliberated over the chicken-and-egg dilemma of what comes first: security or economic opportunity.  For the most part, circumstances forced an emphasis on the provision of security, with the focus on reconstruction and moreover long-term economic growth taking a back seat. 

But this cannot be the long term way forward. It is not enough for Maliki's party, or any other party, to attract voters via short-term employment incentives; at some stage they must offer daring economic visions for the future.  March 7 should have been a good stage for that.

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