On 27 October 2022, Iraqi lawmakers approved a new coalition government ending more than a year of deadlock and raising hopes that the beleaguered country could at last start rebuilding.
However, one year on, optimistic expectations of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani have been proven wrong, as Iraq remains deadlocked in political, ethnic, and economic crises.
A new start under Al-Sudani was badly needed to fix a broken country and rejuvenate the post-US invasion political system that has been marked by chronic uncertainty, societal divisions, a security crisis, and rampant corruption.
Upon taking office, Al-Sudani vowed to reinstate the state’s authority, reform the economy, fight corruption, improve deteriorating public services, and combat poverty and unemployment.
Yet, after its first year in office many measures taken by Al-Sudani’s government seem to have been more designed for show than to bring about lasting change. The government has done little to fulfill its programme and now appears tired, uncertain, and lacking direction.
Instead, Al-Sudani has sought to please the country’s ruling Shia elites who elevated him to the post rather than making progress in ending the stalemate in the country, which is nowhere near over.
As a result, political clouds are gathering as splits widen within the already divided Shia community, and Muqtada Al-Sadr, the powerful Shia cleric, remains opposed to the government.
Sunni and Kurdish political groups in Iraq are also losing faith that Al-Sudani is capable of ending the domestic political chaos that dogged so many of his predecessors and kept these groups on the fringes of power.
In the coming months, the beleaguered nation will have to grapple with more unpredictability and its impact on nation-building and security.
Top of the list of the challenges facing Al-Sudani’s government is Al-Sadr’s opposition, which is polarising the country’s Shias along communal and political lines.
Al-Sadr’s faction won the parliamentary elections in October 2021 with a majority of 73 seats, not enough to allow him to appoint a prime minister and form a government, but having a powerful popular movement that could disrupt the process.
A stand-off between Al-Sadr and his Iran-backed rivals triggered deadly unrest and made Al-Sadr withdrew his lawmakers from the parliament in protest, prompting the worst crisis inside the Shia camp since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Although Al-Sadr said he was resigning from politics and declared he would not participate in the next parliamentary elections, he still occasionally orders his followers to take to the streets in protest.
Flaunting his role as a powerful politician, Al-Sadr summoned his supporters to a mass rally in Baghdad in July to protest against the burning of a copy of the Quran in Sweden and then again in October to denounce the Israeli war on Gaza.
By flexing his political muscles every now and then, Al-Sadr, who has kept his powerful Al-Salam Brigade militia operational, has been trying to retain a place in Iraq’s politics.
His call on all Iraqis to boycott this month’s provincial elections in order to “strip” the Shia ruling groups of “legitimacy” could be even more disturbing. Several Shia-majority constituencies have seen the vandalism of campaign billboards, raising fears of violence.
If the ruling Shia groups are caught up in a row over the election results, Iraqis will have to live under the shadow of chaos, with armed groups competing for power and influence.
Another troubling challenge that has been hemorrhaging Iraq’s governance is the disarray within the political leadership of its Sunni Arab community.
The new round of chaos was fuelled by the election of a new speaker of parliament after Iraq’s top court ousted former speaker Mohamed Al-Halbousi from his post.
Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court said in a statement that it had decided to terminate Al-Halbousi’s mandate after it indicted him for allegedly forging the resignation papers of a fellow Sunni lawmaker.
Al-Halbousi was the highest Sunni official in Iraq and was reelected to the post under the terms of forming Al-Sudani’s coalition government by the State Management Alliance (SMA).
Iraq’s post US-invasion governments have been framed as consensus governments formed among political factions representing its three major communities of the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds.
Under the country’s sectarian power-sharing system, the speaker of parliament is always a Sunni, the prime minister a Shia, and the president a Kurd.
Unless the dispute over Al-Halbousi’s ousting is resolved without significant fallout, the move could mark a watershed moment in Iraq’s already fragile political process.
The federal capital Baghdad’s relationship with the Kurdistan Region Government (KRG) remains sensitive and has been marred by political and constitutional disputes over federal powers, the budget, and oil resources.
Since the KRG held an independence referendum for Iraqi Kurdistan in 2017, ties between the enclave and the federal authorities in Baghdad have been strained after Baghdad retook control of large chunks of territory seized by the Kurds after the US-invasion in 2003.
The dispute occasionally erupts into confrontations between the Iraqi military and Kurdish Peshmerga forces over the control of strategic posts. A clash on 22 October this year left three Iraqi soldiers killed and several others wounded.
Tighter restrictions were also imposed on the KRG regarding its exploitation of natural resources in the region with Baghdad’s consent and its ability to spend its allocations from the national budget.
Kurdish leaders accuse the Shia coalition that is leading the Baghdad government of trying to restrain the KRG’s powers via budgetary controls and the curtailing of its oil exports, two lifelines for the KRG.
Any failure to find sustainable solutions for these and other disputes could easily cause a crisis between Baghdad and the KRG, with the potential to trigger an unwanted confrontation that would threaten the whole of Iraq.
Iraq’s economy is an added challenge for Al-Sudani. His government has failed to address badly needed economic reforms, primarily to reduce the country’s dependency on oil revenues and reduce waste and control expenditure.
On the contrary, Al-Sudani has maintained his predecessors’ rentier policy of depending on oil and abandoning the domestic productive sector in order to increase non-oil growth and create jobs in the private sector.
He has heavily relied on oil revenues to finance the public sector’s dominance of the economy and to create as many as 600,000 public sector jobs to add to the already inflated government payroll.
The World Bank has noted in a report that Al-Sudani’s government showed “a low appetite for reforms, thereby constraining long term economic growth prospects.”
It found that Iraq’s dominant and undercapitalised state-owned banks and weak private banking sector remain major barriers to economic diversification.
The international ratings agency Moody’s affirmed Iraq’s Caa1 rating in November, saying this was a result of a “steady renewed deterioration” in fiscal metrics and further entrenching Iraq’s structural vulnerabilities.
Many of Iraq’s economic problems, especially in the monetary and financial sectors, are related to a series of punitive measures imposed by the US Treasury targeting the country’s financial sector.
With more than $100 billion from Iraq’s oil revenues held in the US, the US Treasury measures have led to a dollar shortage in Iraq that has led the Iraqi dinar to change hands at more than 1.58 per dollar in the black market in recent months, up to 17 per cent more than the official rate of 1.32.
The US claims that the Treasury measures are meant to target fraud, money laundering and evasion of the sanctions on Iran, but the move has triggered a staggering bill in terms of living standards, added to the other economic hardships that ordinary Iraqis face.
Climate change also risks upending efforts to maintain the country’s stability and development. International reports describe the environmental challenge as Iraq’s “silent enemy” that is wreaking havoc in the country.
The reports suggest that as water scarcity grows in Iraq, the country’s government needs to put in place a comprehensive strategy aligned with the realities of climate change that continue to take their toll on the country.
Overall, Al-Sudani’s government remains exposed to political instability, social insecurity, civil unrest due to Iraq’s vulnerability to declines in oil prices, and US financial restraints.
One of its greatest challenges lies in dealing with the presence of about 2,000 US soldiers in Iraq under agreement with Baghdad mainly to train Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) terror group.
The Israeli war in Gaza has spurred widespread anti-Americanism in Iraq and increased pressure on the government to accelerate the withdrawal of the US forces.
It has prompted missile and drone attacks by some Iran-backed militias on US military facilities in Iraq and eastern Syria.
In tit-for-tat retaliation, the US forces have conducted a series of airstrikes killing and wounding several militiamen and destroying facilities used by Iranian proxies.
The militias retaliated by launching a daring rocket attack at the fortified US Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone on 8 December. In the following days, the US forces came under attack several times in a mix of rocket and drone attacks.
Until recently, the exchanges had caused no known casualties among the US forces and the militiamen, which probably acted to deter escalatory options.
But more aggressive militia bombings and US retaliation could trigger wider escalation with ripple effects on Iraq’s fragile stability.
In the meantime, the UN Security Council is set to reassess activities in Iraq by UNAMI, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which might result in a new paradigm for its work.
An Independent Strategic Review Team has been mandated by the council to conduct investigations to evaluate current threats to Iraq’s peace and security.
The team will also probe ways to “optimise UNAMI’s mandate, mission structure, and staffing to support the Baghdad government in addressing the challenges of peace and security.”
The reassessment is expected to reflect regional and international stakeholder concerns about how little progress has been made on political stability and structural reforms so far in order to bring Iraq back to normal.
Given the stagnant environment and the frustration of the hopes raised by Al-Sudani’s government to tackle such challenges, Iraq’s future remains hanging in the balance.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 December, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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