BAGHDAD (AP) — A militant extremist group’s unilateral
declaration of an Islamic state is threatening to undermine its
already-tenuous alliance with other Sunnis who helped it overrun much of
northern and western Iraq.
One uneasy ally has vowed to resist if the militants try to impose their strict interpretation of Shariah
law.
Fighters
from the al-Qaida breakaway group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
have spearheaded the offensive in recent weeks that has plunged Iraq
into its deepest crisis since the last U.S. troops left in 2011. The
group’s lightning advance has brought under its control territory
stretching from northern Syria as far as the outskirts of Baghdad in
central Iraq.
In a bold move Sunday, the group announced the
establishment of its own state, or caliphate, governed by Islamic law.
It proclaimed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a highly ambitious Iraqi
militant with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, to be the caliph,
and it demanded that Muslims around the world pledge allegiance to him.
Through
brute force and meticulous planning, the Sunni extremist group — which
said it was changing its name to simply the Islamic State, dropping the
reference to Iraq and the Levant — has managed to effectively erase the
Syria-Iraq border and lay the foundations of its proto-state. Along the
way, it has battled Syrian rebels, Kurdish militias and the Syrian and
Iraqi militaries.
Now, the group’s declaration risks straining its
loose alliances with other Sunnis who share the militants’ hopes of
bringing down Iraq’s Shiite-led government but not necessarily its
ambitions of carving out a transnational caliphate. Iraq’s minority
Sunnis complain they have been treated as second-class citizens and
unfairly targeted by security forces.
Topping the list of uneasy
allies is the Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi Order, a Sunni militant
organization with ties to Saddam Hussein’s now-outlawed Baath Party.
The group depicts itself as a nationalist force that defends Iraq’s
Sunnis from Shiite rule.
A senior Naqshabandi commander in Diyala
province northeast of Baghdad told The Associated Press that his group
has "no intention" of joining the Islamic State or working under it. He
said that "would be a difficult thing to do because our ideology is
different from the Islamic State’s extremist ideology."
"Till now,
the Islamic State fighters are avoiding any friction with us in the
areas we control in Diyala, but if they are to change their approach
toward our fighters and people living in our areas, we expect rounds of
fighting with the Islamic State’s people," said the commander who goes
by the nom de guerre of Abu Fatima.
A second Naqshabandi leader in
Diyala, in the Sunni town of Qara Tappah, also dismissed the notion of
submitting to the militants’ vision.
"We reject the caliphate rule
presented by them. We are totally different from the Islamic State,"
said the commander, who goes by the name of Abu Abid. He too said that
so far relations have been friendly enough, but that residents are wary
of what the future may hold.
"Their number is small but we are
afraid of the future when their number in the town becomes big," he
said. "We know that these militants are treacherous and they plan to
eliminate any competition, but we are ready to stop them."
If
history is any guide, they have reason to worry. In Syria, the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant also cooperated with many rebel groups
after initially pushing into the country in spring 2013. Over time,
however, it moved against its erstwhile allies and eventually crushed
them.
It has followed a similar pattern in imposing its strict
interpretation of Islamic law, choosing to overlook some practices it
considers forbidden before eventually tightening its grip and
implementation.
In Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, which the
insurgents overran earlier in June, they issued rules but have not
rigidly enforced them. Signs emerged Sunday that tactics may be changing
there.
Residents said three or four armed men in Afghan-style
clothing but speaking in Iraqi accents told cafe owners in the Ghabat — a
wooded area dotted with cafes and popular with locals — to stop serving
water pipes, or shisha, saying it is forbidden under Islamic law. Other
cafes in the city followed suit out of fear, and traders in Mosul were
told Monday to stop importing the water pipes to the city, residents
said.
The showcase of the extremist group’s vision of its Islamic
state is Raqqa, a city of 500,000 in northern Syria along the Euphrates
River. Since expelling rival rebel groups this spring from the city, the
militants have banned music, forced Christians to pay an Islamic tax
for protection, and killed violators of its interpretation of Islam in
the main square, activists say.
It was among the group’s
supporters in Raqqa that the declaration of establishing the caliphate
touched off some of the largest scenes of jubilation, with fighters
parading in the city. Some revelers wore traditional robes and waved the
group’s black flags in a central square, while others zoomed around in
pickup trucks amid celebratory gunfire.
Activists in the city confirmed details of the online video of the events.
Elsewhere
in Syria, the announcement was greeted with condemnation and even
disdain, including from rival rebel groups who have been fighting the
Islamic State since January.
"The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living
in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state
but they don’t have the elements for it," said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a
spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. "You cannot
establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing."
Speaking
over Skype from eastern Ghouta, near the capital of Damascus, al-Shami
described the declaration as "psychological warfare" that he predicted
will turn people against the Islamic State.
In Iraq, where the
government has launched a counteroffensive to try to claw back some of
the territory it has lost, the declaration is viewed through the prism
of the country’s rising sectarian tensions.
"This is a project
that was well-planned to rupture the society and to spread chaos and
damage," said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a Sunni lawmaker. "This is not to the
benefit of the Iraqi people, but instead it will increase the
differences and splits."
The government, which has tried portray
the broader Sunni insurgency it faces as a terrorist threat, pointed to
the Islamic State’s declaration to back up its claims. Government
spokesman Ali al-Moussawi said: "The world now bears a big and ethical
responsibility to fight those terrorists who made Iraq and Syria their
battlefield."
With sectarian pressures already running high, three
mortar shells landed near the gate of a much-revered Shiite shrine in
the city of Samarra late Monday, wounding at least nine people, said
Mizhar Fleih, the deputy head of the Samarra municipal council.
The
golden-domed al-Askari mosque in Samarra is one of the holiest shrines
in Shiite Islam. Sunni militants blew up the dome in 2006, helping
trigger some of the country’s worst sectarian bloodshed as Shiite
extremists retaliated forcefully.
Also Monday, the U.N.’s
humanitarian office reported that the number of people fleeing their
homes in the ongoing crisis in Iraq continues to increase rapidly and
has reached an estimated 650,000, bringing the total number of
displaced, including from Anbar province, to over 1.2 million inside
Iraq, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
"Our hope remain very
much that … the political meetings in Iraq tomorrow will create a
positive atmosphere to create a government in which all Iraqis feel they
have a voice," Dujarric said at U.N. headquarters in New York.
Iraq’s
new parliament holds its inaugural session Tuesday. The country’s top
Shiite cleric urged lawmakers last week to agree on a prime minister
before lawmakers meet, trying to avert months of wrangling that could
further destabilize Iraq.
___
Associated Press writers Sinan
Salaheddin and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, Zeina Karam in Beirut,
and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.