The sixth war in Iraq

War Two: Nation-building
2003-2004
For a year Iraqis waited while the new U.S. administration in Baghdad tried to rebuild Iraqi society, purging Saddam’s Baath Party and dissolving the army.

It was a peaceful time, but it was disastrously mismanaged.

The United States proved it knew how to destroy Iraq’s army and bureaucracy but clearly had no plan to replace it. It was also a time of radical social change.

The Americans — both the White House and the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer — promised Iraqis democracy, and Shiites, the majority, took them at their word.

For Shiites, democracy meant majority rule. Within days of the fall of Saddam’s government, Shiite political parties and militias began to overrun Sunni mosques and rename streets in Baghdad after Shiite heroes. Religious Shiites resumed mass pilgrimages banned under Saddam to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Iran, the world’s greatest Shiite power, started to pump in hundreds of millions of dollars to empower Iraqi Shiites and win influence. The second war, the war of nation-building, was peaceful, but the ground was set for conflict.

War Three: Insurgency
2004-2005
Iraqi Sunnis, the backbone of Saddam’s regime and security services, lashed out in the spring of 2004. 

Sunnis had waited peacefully for a year – confused but seething in quiet — as the U.S. administration in Baghdad bungled its attempts at nation-building. By the spring of 2004, many Sunnis decided they’d had enough.

Sunnis, especially members of Saddam’s previous government and army, felt betrayed by their American “liberators.”  They were out of jobs and humiliated. They were also terrified by the growing power of Shiites and Iran. Many Sunnis grew up fighting Iran and had a state-fueled paranoia about their Persian Shiite neighbor. Now Iraqi Sunnis were watching Iran and Iraqi Shiites take over.

Some disenfranchised Sunnis decided to reached out for help. Al-Qaida, the world’s most radical Sunni movement, was waiting with open arms. Iraqi Sunnis formed alliances with al-Qaida militants, including the brutally effective Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. 

Sunni militants began attacking U.S. troops and Shiites, whom they considered American-empowered Iranian stooges. The third war, the war of the Sunni insurgency, lasted about two years.

War Four: Civil war
2006-2007
After two years of abuse from Sunni radicals, Iraqi Shiites started to fight back. From 2004 through the end of 2005, many Shiites sat quietly as Sunni radicals killed Shiite religious leaders, bombed Shiite pilgrimages and husseiniyat (small Shiite mosques) and carried out suicide massacres in Shiite neighborhoods. 

But in February 2006, Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq went too far. The radical group destroyed the Shiite “Golden Mosque” in Samarra. The mosque is linked to the Shiite savior, the Mahdi. It is the place where many Shiites expect the Mahdi to emerge from his Divine Occultation and redeem the world in a similar way that many Christians see the Second Coming of Christ. 

Shiites reacted to the destruction of their holy shrine in Samarra with an explosion of fury and hate. Shiite militias led by the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ignored calls for restraint by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and began to attack Sunni civilians and evict them from their homes.

Sunni and Shiite militant groups were soon in open war, killing each other in the streets. Morgues filled with bodies. Reporters were killed in the crossfire. Iraq became the most dangerous conflict for journalists in recorded history. Sunni and Shiite radicals killed anyone who got between them, including American troops. 

The civil war, the fourth war, lasted from February 2006 to the summer of 2007, 16 months of grinding carnage.

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