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musingsofmonica · 1 month

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February 2024 Diverse Read

February 2024 Diverse Reads:

•”My Beloved Life” by Amitava Kumar, February 27, Knopf Publishing Group, Historical/Literary/World Literature/India

•”Whiskey Tender: A Memoir” by Deborah Taffa, February 27, Harper, Personal Memoirs/Women/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/Native American & Aboriginal

•”I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both” by Mariah Stovall, February 13, Soft Skull, Contemporary/Coming of Age/Friendship/African American/Women

•”Private Equity: A Memoir” by Carrie Sun, February 13, Penguin Press, Personal Memoirs/Women in Business/Business/Finance/Wealth Management/Investments & Securities

•”Village in the Dark” by Iris Yamashita, February 13, Berkley Books, Mystery & Detective/Police Procedural/Thriller/Suspense/Women

•”Redwood Court” by Délana R. a. Dameron, February 06, Dial Press, Literary/Coming of Age/Women/African American/Southern

•”Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange, February 27, Knopf Publishing Group, Literary/Cultural Heritage/Native American & Aboriginal

•Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

Hwang Bo-Reum & Shanna Tan (Translator), February 20, Bloomsbury Publishing, Contemporary/City Life/World Literature/Korea

•”Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays

Aisha Sabatini Sloan, February 20, Graywolf, Essays/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/African American & Black/LGBT/Anthropology/Cultural & Social

•”The Things We Didn't Know” by Elba Iris Pérez, February 06, Gallery Books, Literary/Coming of Age/World Literature/Puerto Rico/20th Century

•“The Fox Maidens” by Robin Ha, February 13, Harperalley, Comics & Graphic Novels/Historical/Fairy Tales/Folklore/Legends & Mythology Fantasy/Romance/LGBT/World Literature/Korea

•”Hope Ablaze” by Sarah Mughal Rana, February 27, Wednesday Books, Magical Realism, Poetry/Religious/Muslim/Social Themes - Activism & Social Justice

•“ASAP” by Axie Oh, February 06, Harperteen, YA/Romance/Contemporary/Coming of Age/Asian American

•”Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories” by Amitav Ghosh, February 13, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nonfiction/Historical/Travelogue/Memoir/Family History/Essay in History/Globalism/Capitalism

•”Fathomfolk” by Eliza Chan, February 27, Orbit, Fantasy/Action & Adventure/Dragons & Mythical Creatures/East Asian Mythology

•”Ours” by Phillip B. Williams, February 20, Viking, Literary/Historical/African American/Magical Realism

•”Neighbors and Other Stories” by Diane Oliver, February 13, Grove Press, Short Stories/Literary/Historical/African American & Black

•”Greta & Valdin” by Rebecca K. Reilly, February 06, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, Literary/Romcom/Family Life/LGBT/Cultural Heritage/World Literature/New Zealand/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/Russian-Maori-Catalonian/Indigenous/Polynesian

•”The American Daughters” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, February 27, One World, Historical/Civil War Era/Saga/African American/Women

•”My Side of the River: A Memoir” by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez, January 13, St. Martin's Press, Personal Memoirs/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/Hispanic & Latino/Public Policy - Immigration

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 months

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By: David French

Published: Oct 12, 2023

The instant I understood the scale of Hamas’s attack on Israel, I understood the probable response. As I read reports of Hamas terrorists murdering entire families, raping Israeli women beside the bodies of their dead friends and dragging Israeli hostages into Gaza, it was apparent that Hamas had chosen to behave like ISIS, and if it behaved like ISIS, then the Israel Defense Forces were justified in treating Hamas in Gaza the same way the United States and its allies treated ISIS in Iraq.

The comparison is not lost on Israel. After the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas is ISIS. And just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas.”

This means Israel’s goal is not to punish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from power in Gaza the way the Iraqi military, the United States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Falluja, Ramadi and every other city ISIS controlled in Iraq. That can’t be accomplished by air power alone. If removing Hamas from power is the goal, then that almost certainly means soldiers and tanks fighting in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of roughly two million people.

The purpose of this newsletter is to give you a primer on both the military difficulty of the task and the humanitarian constraints on it, along with the limitations that are unique to Israel. It, like every other advanced democracy, is bound by the law of armed conflict. This means Israel may not treat Gaza the way, say, the Soviet Army treated Berlin in 1945. Even in its rage and pain, Israel may not level cities without regard for innocent life.

There is a model for Israeli victory in Gaza, but that model also illustrates the magnitude of the challenge. In the fall of 2016, around 100,000 Iraqi security forces and their allies massed outside Mosul and faced a daunting task: to remove the Islamic State from a vast, densely populated city when that army was deeply embedded in the city and had been able to prepare elaborate defenses.

Compounding the problem were that the civilian population, unlike during other recent urban battles in Iraq, largely remained in the city and that ISIS had no desire to facilitate a civilian evacuation. When the United States entered Falluja in 2004 during its war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, a vast majority of civilians had already fled. When soldiers and Marines engaged insurgents in street battles there, there were far fewer civilians in the zone of combat.

Mosul, by contrast, was largely fought in and around the civilian population and was at the time quite possibly the largest and deadliest urban battle since the end of World War II. Iraqi soldiers — supported by American air power — assaulted a city of more than one million people. The resulting battle took nine months to complete; killed thousands of ISIS fighters, by most estimates; cost the Iraqi security forces thousands of casualties; and, despite considerable efforts to protect noncombatants, killed up to 11,000 civilians. But Iraq won, ISIS lost, and ISIS no longer controls Mosul.

How does this fight compare with a battle in the heart of Gaza? The Israel Defense Forces will be better trained and more prepared than the Iraqi security forces — with a greater capacity to protect noncombatants — but if Israeli military history informs the present situation, the Israel Defense Forces will not have the luxury of time. It will almost certainly have to execute its major combat operations in much less than the nine months it took to defeat ISIS in Mosul.

To help me more fully understand the nature of the battle in Gaza, I called John Spencer, the chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern Warfare Institute. The conversation made one thing very clear to me and resonated with my training and experience as a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Israel’s military mission is inseparable from its legal obligations. When a nation abides by the law of war, which Israel requires its soldiers to do, it fundamentally changes the way it fights and the experiences of its soldiers on the ground.

For example, a nation that disregards the law of war often approaches urban combat by destroying as much of the city as it can to weaken defenses before the attack and then, when it enters the city, it presumes structures are full of enemies and destroys buildings at will.

When a nation complies with the law of war, the presumptions switch. Civilian structures are presumed to be benign unless solid intelligence or hostile action demonstrates otherwise. As a practical matter, this means that air power alone is insufficient for the job. As Spencer told me, aircraft “can’t see through steel-reinforced concrete,” so tanks and troops have to enter a city to truly clear it.

But when they do, the defender gets an initial advantage. As Spencer said, the “attacker has to walk down the street and take a punch to the face.” Then it can respond. Israel understands that reality and adjusts its tactics accordingly, often leading with armored vehicles that can take the punch without incurring casualties.

Don’t think for a moment, however, that use of precision weapons means that cities can endure invasions without suffering terrifying damage. Before and after aerial views of Mosul reveal incredible devastation. Iraqi forces were generally less trained than the Israel Defense Forces, but that doesn’t account for the full extent of the destruction. Much of the damage was the result of the large-scale use of America’s most precise weapons. Spencer told me that the U.S. dangerously depleted its stocks of its extremely precise Hellfire missiles during the battle.

Spencer called the widespread destruction inflicted by precise weapons the “precision paradox.” I’ve also heard it described as spiderwebbing. Imagine if you have 10 ISIS fighters in one building. Iraqi forces call in an airstrike, and U.S. forces hit the building with a missile or bomb, but it doesn’t kill every fighter in the building. The remaining fighters scatter to two or three nearby buildings, which are then precisely targeted by additional munitions. The result is a form of slow-motion demolition, in which each strike might be quite precise but the cumulative effect can eventually make the city look as if it had been carpet-bombed.

We’re already seeing the phenomenon in Gaza. We are witnessing nothing like the immediate mass destruction of an indiscriminate attack, but large numbers of precision attacks can still inflict extreme (and deadly) damage.

If civilians aren’t evacuated from the combat zone, the intensity of combat makes significant civilian casualties inevitable, even if Israel fully complies with the law of war. I also spoke this week to James Verini, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine, who wrote “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” perhaps the definitive on-the-ground account of the fight for Mosul, and two things he said stood out in the conversation.

First, because precision weapons sometimes miss and intelligence often fails, airstrikes inevitably inflict serious collateral damage, including civilian casualties. Second, as the fight drags on and ramps up in intensity, concern for civilian lives often diminishes. That was the pattern for the less-disciplined Iraqi security forces, but we can’t for a moment presume that Israeli soldiers are superhuman. Most of them are draftees and reservists. They’re subject to the same fears and temptations under extreme stress and anger as any other soldier in any other army.

Then there’s the factor of time. Spencer observed that Israel always fights against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The United States is an independent economic and military superpower. We possess the world’s most powerful military and the world’s most potent economy. We have the luxury of fighting on timetables we set. If we want to slow down and take nine months to clear a city, we can take nine months to clear a city.

Israel possesses a powerful military and a strong economy, but it is still ultimately a dependent power. It cannot ignore international (and especially U.S.) pressure. In addition, calling hundreds of thousands of reservists out of the work force weakens the economy. In every major conflict since its war for independence, Israel has had to race to accomplish its military objectives before international pressure forced a cease-fire. The sheer scale of Hamas’s atrocities may increase the patience of the international community for an Israeli offensive, but that patience has never been unlimited.

Put all this together, and you can immediately perceive Israel’s asymmetric challenge. Hamas scorns the law of war. The reports of its intentional mass killing, mutilation, rape and civilian hostage taking are evidence enough of that fact. Israel legally and morally obligates the Israel Defense Forces to comply with the law. As a result, civilians become one of Hamas’s principal military assets. The presence of civilians gives Hamas the ability to punch first in any given street fight. The presence of civilians raises the bar for approving airstrikes or any other use of long-range weapons. And when civilians die, Hamas uses their deaths to inflame the international community and to help run out the clock on international patience for Israeli military operations.

Even worse, Hamas is helped by an enormous amount of public ignorance combined with outright misinformation. The average journalist — much less the average citizen — doesn’t know much, if anything, about the laws of war. Let’s take, for example, two key legal concepts that will be relevant every single day of the fighting in Gaza: proportionality and distinction.

As the war continues and as the destruction mounts, you will hear a number of voices condemn Israel for a disproportionate response, but many of these critics fundamentally misunderstand what proportionality means in the law of war. The U.S. Army’s “Law of Land Warfare” field manual — which is deeply grounded in the international law of armed conflict and governed our urban operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — defines the legal obligation of proportionality as requiring “commanders to refrain from attacks in which the expected loss or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” It also requires that commanders “take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, other protected persons and civilian objects.”

Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.

In reality, inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force. Ukraine appears to have inflicted substantially greater casualties on Russia than the Russian Army has inflicted on Ukraine. That doesn’t mean Ukraine’s response was disproportionate under the law of armed conflict. In every fight, the goal is to inflict as many losses as possible on your opponent while taking as few losses as possible.

There is a similar public ignorance problem with the concept of distinction, which “The Law of Land Warfare” defines as requiring combatants to distinguish “between combatants and military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian objects on the other in offense and defense.” Distinction requires soldiers to separate themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms, for example, or by fighting from marked military vehicles. It prohibits militaries from fighting from places like hospitals, schools and mosques.

Hamas disregards the principle of distinction. Its fighters take aim from civilian buildings while wearing civilian clothes and using civilian vehicles. This presents an attacking military with serious targeting problems. It is easy to identify, say, an armored personnel carrier as a military vehicle. But what if there are four Toyota Tacomas in the street and only one is full of Hamas fighters?

But here’s the key point: When Hamas abandons the principle of distinction, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results. If Hamas fights from a hospital — or stores munitions in a hospital — damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility. If Hamas fighters shoot at Israel Defense Forces from a home that contains a Palestinian family, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties if that family is harmed in the resulting exchange of fire.

There is also the unique military legal doctrine of siege warfare. On Monday, Israel announced a “complete siege” and said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed inside the Gaza Strip. A siege is an ancient form of warfare, and the modern legal obligations of a besieging party are a matter of dispute, but again, “The Law of Land Warfare” is instructive. It explicitly declares it “lawful” to cut off “reinforcements, supplies and communications,” but it also states that the belligerents should “make reasonable, good-faith efforts to conclude local agreements for the removal of wounded, sick, infirm and aged persons, children and maternity cases from the besieged or encircled area.”

Given these realities, you can see the dynamic that will unfold. Bound by the laws of war, Israel has every incentive to decrease civilian casualties. The Israel Defense Forces are already providing detailed evacuation instructions for civilians to remove them from the zones of expected conflict. Netanyahu has urged residents to leave Gaza. Disregarding the law of war, Hamas has concrete tactical and strategic reasons to keep civilians in harm’s way and capitalize on their deaths.

To accurately describe that dynamic is not to pre-emptively excuse every single civilian death at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces. We are already seeing reports of significant civilian casualties from Israeli airstrikes, and it will be necessary to investigate them to ensure that the Israeli military followed proper protocols when approving those strikes. The siege will become legally and morally untenable if civilians cannot leave the besieged areas and if they’re blocked from receiving life-sustaining supplies. Egypt has responsibilities as well. If it continues to block entry into Sinai from Gaza, it will be contributing to the humanitarian crisis.

During the war on terrorism, the Army and Marines often embedded JAG officers (lawyers specifically trained in the law of armed conflict) with combat arms units to try to ensure compliance with the laws of war under circumstances every bit as difficult as the ones the Israel Defense Forces face in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces also rely heavily on their lawyers. When I served in Iraq with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, that was my job. Yet our military still made mistakes. Some American soldiers (not in my unit) committed war crimes, in spite of comprehensive training and numerous constraints placed on the use of force.

Every violation of the law should carry a consequence, but the law of war does not prevent Israel from destroying a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population. It can be done. It has been done. And as Israel embarks on perhaps its most difficult military operation since its war for independence, public clarity about the law of war will be indispensable for depriving Hamas of one of its chief propaganda weapons, and continued enforcement of the law of war can prevent atrocities that could fuel this conflict for generations to come.

[ Via: https://archive.md/IHYo8 ]

Did you know that Israel and Palestine were already in a cease-fire when Hamas launched their terrorist attack? So, the current admonishment to Israel to stand down and accept a cease-fire is absurd on its face.

It's the same pattern that always happens. Hamas commits some atrocious act, Israel retaliates, Hamas cries foul, the west panders to them and convinces Israel to accept another cease-fire. Things go dormant for a bit, giving Hamas another opportunity to regroup and reorganize, then the cycle starts again. Israel always has to turn the other cheek, and Hamas always avoids all consequences.

The west needs to let Israel obliterate Hamas once and for all, to kill everybody involved in Hamas, and destroy or confiscate all their resources. Otherwise, nothing will ever change; Palestine will never be free of its terrorist rulers, and Israel and Palestine will never be able to find a sincere coexistence.

#David French #Hamas #ISIS #islamic terrorism #islamic fanaticism #exterminate Hamas #down with Hamas #religion #islam #religion of violence #exterminate hamas #free gaza #free gaza from hamas #religion is a mental illness

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mariacallous · 5 months

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Heading west from Baghdad, the capital’s bumpy roads turn into a well-lit, smoothly paved three-lane highway rarely seen in Iraq. Every so often, billboards adorned with slick pictures of Mohammed al-Halbousi credit Iraq’s recently deposed speaker of parliament with the reconstruction of Anbar, his home province.

“Halbousi restored the prestige of the Sunnis and of the province,” said Hamed Albu Alwan, a tribal elder who supports him. Outside the entrance to his spacious diwan (where tribal gatherings take place) in Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, workers toiled away in the midday sun as they covered the road with a fresh layer of shiny asphalt. “If we had three to four leaders like him, Iraq could become a normal country again,” the sheikh said.

Anbar saw some of the fiercest fighting in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion and again a decade later, when the war against the Islamic State ravaged its cities. But in contrast to other Sunni areas that suffered a similar fate, Iraq’s westernmost province has seen remarkable development in recent years. This reconstruction boom, some of it financed by the U.S. government as part of a U.N. reconstruction program, has coincided with the extraordinary ascent of the most powerful Sunni politician since Saddam Hussein’s overthrow.

Within just four years of entering politics in 2014, the now 42-year-old Halbousi rose from a little-known businessman to speaker of parliament, the most senior Sunni post in Shiite-majority Iraq. Halbousi held that position since 2018 until recently, making him the only Iraqi politician to serve more than one term since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. But his success in consolidating power has fomented a backlash among Sunnis and Shiites alike.

Last Tuesday, Iraq’s federal court issued a ruling terminating Halbousi’s membership of parliament, the culmination of months of power struggle between the speaker and a growing lineup of rivals. Halbousi was found guilty of forgery in a case filed by former member of parliament Laith al-Dulaimi, who accused Halbousi of using a fake resignation letter to blackmail him.

“He has begun to enslave the MPs,” Laith al-Dulaimi told Foreign Policy when he filed the case in early 2023. Dulaimi said that ahead of the 2021 parliamentary election, Halbousi forced him and others to sign blank letters, which he used when they deviated from the party line. “He targets any voice that challenges him. All the authority, all the money must be for him only.” In a statement, Halbousi’s party alleged political targeting and called the court decision a “flagrant violation of the constitution.”

The court case was just one of several, simultaneous efforts to depose Halbousi amid a myriad of grievances documented by Foreign Policy. In wide-ranging interviews, seven tribal leaders, nine politicians, eight officials and three members of civil society paint a picture of pervasive state capture at the hands of a politician whom almost all of the interviewees allege has built a political and economic empire through embezzlement of public funds and the use of force.

Halbousi stands accused of throwing rivals into jail, punishing critics with arrest warrants under Iraq’s sweeping anti-defamation laws, and disqualifying rivals from elections by abusing harsh de-Baathification provisions that forbid members of the former regime from participating in the political process, according to interviews and documents seen by Foreign Policy. Halbousi and his office have not replied to repeated requests for interviews.

Taken individually, none of the tactics in Halbousi’s arsenal are particularly unusual. To the contrary, they largely follow a well-worn playbook that has become the defining legacy of the U.S.-led invasion. Iraq is one of the world’s most corrupt nations, where officials tend to exploit their positions for the sake of self-enrichment and to build patronage networks that will entrench them in the halls of power. But few Iraqi politicians, let alone a Sunni one, have mastered state capture quite as successfully.

Even though the role of the speaker is to head the parliament, Halbousi remained the de facto executive authority in Anbar long after he left his previous post as governor and has managed to establish what some describe as one-party rule in the province, with government posts, services, and success in elections contingent on support for his Progress Party.

“He intervenes in the process of replacing and changing security or administrative leaders and in the mechanisms of disbursing the budget and its projects,” said Salim al-Jabouri, a senior Sunni politician who served as speaker before Halbousi.

Interviewees, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, described three major alleged corruption schemes. Halbousi and his lieutenants are said to have monopolized the allocation of government contracts, channeling them to companies owned by relatives or loyalists in return for kickbacks. They also stand accused of diverting funds intended for beneficiaries of social security schemes, such as pensioners or victims of Islamic State, and illegally selling off public land to private investors.

According to the majority of interviewees, the Reconstruction Fund for Areas Affected by Terrorist Operations, worth around $800 million, appears to have been used to fuel Halbousi’s patronage network. “The fund is controlled by the speaker of parliament, Mohammed Al-Halbousi,” said an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of reprisals. “He has turned the fund into a way to buy the loyalty of the security forces. He gives them cars so he can call them and say, arrest this guy or that guy.”

Foreign Policy has reviewed documents that show the allocation of $4.6 million for the provision of vehicles to local security and intelligence organs. (Including $3.1 million for Anbar’s intelligence service and $1.5 million for Anbar’s branch of national security agency, despite the fact that money from the reconstruction fund is meant for the rebuilding of houses, bridges, and schools.)

Since he took power in October last year, Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani has begun to claw back Halbousi’s executive powers by dismissing his loyalists and investigating corruption allegations in Anbar. In June, al-Sudani dismissed the reconstruction fund’s manager due to allegations of fraud and corruption. Several low-level government officials, who have been taken into custody as part of a separate investigation into allegations of illegal sale of land in Anbar, reportedly confessed they were acting at Halbousi’s behest, according to a local sheikh and an official who spoke with the investigators.

An engineer by training and a former U.S. contractor, Halbousi is part of a new generation of Sunni leaders who built their political base with money. What has set him apart from the rest of the pack is his intellect, drive, and ability to strike deals at the right time. He took advantage of a series of crises that have buffeted Iraq over the recent decade, including the war with the Islamic State, the October 2019 demonstrations, and the U.S.-Iran tensions that turned Iraq into a battleground for a global power struggle.

When he first ran for parliament in 2014, the Sunni political establishment was in disarray, its constituents displaced, its land ravaged by war. Halbousi—a young, liberal, up-and-coming politician—successfully positioned himself as an antidote to Anbar’s downfall.

In 2017, he secured the support of Anbar’s provincial council and was appointed governor. The completion of hundreds of U.N. projects came in handy, allowing Halbousi to advertise himself as the man who could get things done. “He showed up just in time to cut the ribbon,” said one former governor, adding that many of the projects had kicked off well before Halbousi’s tenure.

Halbousi’s well-advertised though short stint as governor (he was in power only for a year) served him well as campaigning kicked off for the 2018 parliamentary election. He founded his own party, won six out of 329 seats and, facing some opposition among Sunnis, successfully courted the Shiite leaders who had emerged victors from the battlefield with the Islamic State to win the speakership.

“There was a leadership vacuum among the Sunnis. The Shia started build what they need. They chose the one who is weak, who will be close to them, the one who has no cause,” said a former speaker of Iraq’s parliament, who wished to remain anonymous.

In an anecdote that is often told during late-evening conversations at the residences of senior politicians to illustrate Shiite efforts to find a Sunni ally to do their bidding, Halbousi allegedly pledged support to the late paramilitary leader Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis and Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani—both of whom were killed two years later in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad airport. In return for the speakership, Halbousi reportedly vowed to support the institutionalization of the paramilitaries, called the Popular Mobilization Forces, and safeguard their strategic presence in Sunni areas where they had fought the Islamic State.

Shortly after Halbousi assumed his new role as speaker, changing winds once again strengthened his hand. Mass protests erupted in 2019 across Iraq’s south, rattling the foundations of the post-2003 political order in what became known as the October Revolution. Throngs of Shiite youths took to the streets, demanding an end to corruption and the downfall of the ruling elite. While Shiite politicians focused on crushing the movement, Halbousi quietly broadened his remit, aided by the weakness of two successive governments that permitted encroachment on executive powers.

During Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s administration in particular, Halbousi extended his reach deep into the executive branch. Kadhimi gave Halbousi free rein to run affairs in Sunni areas, including the ability to control appointments to senior security and government posts in Anbar, such as the head of the police or the regional joint operations command, according to numerous sources.

“He was stronger than the Prime Minister,” said Khalid al-Obaidi, who served as Iraq’s defense minister between 2014 and 2016. “Anything Halbousi wanted to implement in Sunni governorates was implemented without Kadhimi’s interference.”

The more power that Halbousi consolidated, the more he deviated from customary principles of power sharing that govern Iraq and Anbar’s tribal society. “He uses money and power. You’re either with him or against him, there’s no middle ground for solutions,” said Sattar al-Jumeili, the leader of the Jumeili tribe, which used to constitute the majority of the local council in Halbousi’s hometown of Garmah before he oversaw a vote to dissolve the councils in 2019.

Halbousi hails from a relatively insignificant tribe in Anbar, an anomaly that he has skillfully overcome by striking deals with Shiite politicians and by courting Gulf countries that see him as a useful partner to further their geopolitical interests. “The man is reliable, and I believe there’s consensus on this in the region,” said one Arab diplomat in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

At home, however, many Sunnis feel that Halbousi has sold their cause for the sake of remaining in power. Despite his long tenure as the head of the legislature, critics say he has not tackled a list of long-running Sunni grievances, such as the abolition of the de-Baathification process and better representation of Sunnis in government and the security apparatus. “He has failed to lead the Sunnis,” said the former speaker of parliament. “He’s behaving like a party boss, not like a speaker.”

Senior Sunni politicians lament that under Halbousi’s leadership, the country’s legislative branch had become less effective, thus eroding the foundations of Iraq’s fragile democracy. “It’s not in our interest for Halbousi to represent the Iraqi parliament. Right now, parliament has no value,” said al-Obaidi, who currently serves on the parliament’s security and defense committee. “The parliament committees are all idle,” he said, adding that their heads have been chosen based on loyalty rather than competence. Two former speakers agreed that the parliament isn’t functioning.

At the beginning of this year, a campaign to unseat Halbousi started to gain momentum in Anbar. On a Friday in May, thousands of men gathered on a sprawling, dusty field near Fallujah to attend a rally organized by Halbousi’s opponents. The so-called United Anbar alliance is spearheaded by a motley of former Sunni governors, ministers, and tribal leaders, and it’s reportedly backed by Shiite politicians who sought to weaken Halbousi’s base in his home province.

Standing atop a stage, a number of officials took turns addressing the crowd. “It is the mistake of those who think that they are the master of Fallujah,” said Jamal al-Karbouli, the leader of the alliance, drawing a parallel between Halbousi’s rule and the U.S. occupation, which the city famously resisted. “We are here today to correct the course and launch a project to restore the rights of Fallujah.”

Karbouli, a political and business heavyweight, helped Halbousi get a foothold in politics back in 2014, only to watch his protégé rebel against him. In 2021, Karbouli was arrested and tortured by an anti-corruption squad used by Kadhimi’s government to go after political opponents. Karbouli and others believe the arrest happened on Halbousi’s orders.

“They disappeared me for five months, with Kadhimi’s agreement, so that Halbousi could win,” Karbouli told Foreign Policy. Karbouli was released without charges shortly after that year’s parliamentary elections.

Karbouli’s arrest is just one example of what some describe as a systemic campaign to crush opposition that has earned Halbousi monikers such as “dictator” or “the new Saddam.” Activists and civilians in Anbar have faced increased intimidation and threats for criticizing authorities on social media. Tribal sheikhs who complained about land grabs or marginalization were summoned by the police chief or charged under archaic Baath-era defamation laws.

But Halbousi’s eventual downfall wasn’t the product of popular discontent in his home province or among Iraq’s Sunnis. In a move that would have sidelined his former Shiite backers, Halbousi agreed in 2021 to form a majority government with populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The alliance was seen as an unprecedented effort by a Sunni to usurp Shiite majority rule by fomenting intra-Shiite rivalries.

Months of political deadlock were ultimately settled through a brief but violent confrontation between rival Shiite factions, which left Sadr defeated and shut out of the political process. Halbousi quickly pivoted back to the Coordination Framework, the Shiite alliance that then formed the ruling coalition. A year on, Halbousi’s turncoat brand of politics appears to have caught up with him.

“He crossed a red line,” said the Arab diplomat. “It was the first time a Sunni tried to divide the Shia. This has not been forgotten.”

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