Iraqi Tribes Announce Support for Islamic State, New Attacks in Syria

The leaders of several prominent Sunni tribes in Iraq announced their support for the Islamic State on Wednesday in Fallujah. Their statement condemned the Iraqi government and claimed that the only way to create peace in Anbar province is through support for the Islamic State. The tribes participating in the announcement include the influential al-Jumaili tribe. Analysts are debating the sincerity of the tribes’ declaration and whether they were forced into supporting it under threat. A German counterterrorism institute has organized a letter from the mothers of Islamic State foreign fighters urging them to leave the organization and return home.

The Syrian government has been bombarding rebels and civilians with barrel bombs laced with toxic chemicals in Idlib province, Human Rights Watch reports. A new report documents attacks in April and May, as the Army of Conquest coalition was asserting control of the province, and calls for swift action at the U.N. Security Council to prevent further attacks. A separate HRW report found that more than a thousand Syrian refugees have been stranded at a desert encampment with little food and water access due to Jordanian border closures.

Turkey Prepares for Election this Weekend

Turkish voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide a critical parliamentary election. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, is hoping to win a large majority to institute sweeping constitutional reforms that would significantly expand the powers of the office of the president. His ambitions are being complicated, though, by the growing popularity of the Kurdish-dominated People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which could win enough seats to block efforts to change the constitution. While Turkey’s Syria policy has not figured prominently in the campaign, the interventionist rhetoric and influx of refugees has stoked discontent with Erdogan’s government in southern towns like Gaziantep.

Headlines

• The British government is no longer pressing its case against a Swedish national arrested last October on charges of supporting terrorism; the case collapsed when it became clear that British intelligence had been supporting the group with which the suspect was involved.
• The Houthi movement confirmed yesterday that they will participate in the June 14 peace talks to be held in Geneva; approximately 2,000 people have been killed in the fighting, including 58 people on Wednesday alone.
• Representatives of Israel and Saudi Arabia announced that they had conducted five secret bilateral meetings in the last year and a half to discuss their shared concern about Iran’s role in the region and ongoing international negotiations to curtail its nuclear program.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the decision of telecom company Orange to withdraw from Israel a “miserable action” and called on countries to declare their opposition to efforts to boycott the country; Orange has said its decision was not politically motivated and is part of an effort to end business agreements in countries where Orange is not an operator.
• Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for patience as the P5+1 nuclear negotiations enter their final month and asked that diplomats not make any new demands that would alter a deal.

Arguments and Analysis

“Iraq after Ramadi: Saving the Anti-ISIL Strategy” (Douglas A. Ollivant, War on the Rocks)

“A unified Iraq is a key U.S. interest because the alternative is unthinkable. Many columnists like to write about the breakup of Iraq or advocate that it should break apart, but it is not clear that they understand for what they are calling. The breakup of Iraq would be a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. The borders between Iraq’s various ethno-sectarian groups are not clean ones, and the dividing lines between Shia and Sunni (Baghdad, Sal-a-Din, Diyala) and Sunni Arabs and Kurds (Diyala, Mosul, Kirkuk) would be bloody ones, particularly for the various minority groups (Turkmen, Christians, Yezidi, etc). The partitions of countries have historically always involved further war, death, and destruction (see India in 1947, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or — more recently — Sudan). Should this worst case occur, the world should expect to see wars within, and not only between, Iraq’s various ethno-sectarian groups. Iraq’s Sunni are divided, particularly between the Anbaris and the northern groups in Sal-a-Din and Mosul. Anyone maintaining that there would be a coherent “Sunni-stan” in a divided Iraq does not understand the internal dynamics of Iraq. One could see further divisions within Iraq’s other groups as well, and a rekindling of civil war between Kurdish factions is far from unthinkable, as is a splintering of Iraq’s south between the southernmost oil-rich provinces and the more resource-poor provinces of Karbala, Najaf, Babil, and Baghdad.”

“Turkey’s Game-Changing Election” (Marc Pierini and Sinan Ülgen, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)

“What’s at stake sets this election apart — the future of Turkey’s political system and the fate of the Kurdish peace process. Erdoğan’s main objective is for the AKP to secure three-fifths of the seats — 330 out of 550 — in the Turkish assembly. This is the number needed to organize a referendum on constitutional amendments designed to introduce a powerful executive-style presidential system in Turkey. Erdoğan’s campaign narrative is almost entirely geared toward achieving this presidential system. His stature makes this objective the de facto central focus of the current election, but this goal has drawn the opposition of all other political parties, as well as some discontent within the AKP itself.”

-J. Dana Stuster

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