Iraq: The lesser of two evils

It was a trip he took often, a 90-minute drive from his mansion on the outskirts of Babel province to the capital. But something went wrong around the time he was stopped at one of many checkpoints in southern Baghdad. Exactly what transpired remains unclear, but the night ended with Qassem Jenabi, a prominent Sunni tribal leader, his son Mohamed and their five bodyguards dead, their bullet-riddled bodies dumped next to their car. Nearly $7,000 in cash was untouched, and Mr Jenabi's nephew, a member of Iraq's parliament, was let go, as if the killers did not want the international attention that would come with murdering an elected official.

"The militias did this," said Salman Jumaili, Iraq's minister of planning, who was among the thousands attending Jenabi's February 16 funeral service, held amid tight security for fear Isis militants would dispatch a suicide bomber. "The Iraqi armed forces and volunteers are fighting Isis. The militias, the extremists, are fighting people like Sheikh Qassem."

With a combination of US-led air strikes, revamped uniformed security forces, Iranian-backed Shia militias and others joining the fight, Isis is slowly being pushed out of Iraq, most recently in Tikrit. But the dirty war against Isis is transforming this oil-rich country into something akin to a mirror image of Isis's sectarian vision, in ways that could have an impact for decades.

Just as Isis attempts to cleanse Shia and Kurds from Sunni areas, the government-backed response is also further upending the sectarian topography of the country - an effort that Mr Jenabi was attempting to counter when he was murdered. The fight against Isis is elevating Iranian-backed Shia militias to positions of serious power in the country, each wooden coffin returning from the battlefront further strengthening the militia's political strength. "There is no doubt that Isis will be defeated," said a western diplomat in the capital. "The big question is, what next? It's a matter of what Iraq ends up looking like at the end of this process. The Shia militias are the next big challenge."

There are signs of competition between the militia groups for control of key installations, including military bases and roadways - though there is no evidence the militias are seeking to usurp the state's authority over key oil installations.

"If we use the militias to liberate the occupied cities, once it is finished, what do we do?" asks Faeq al-Sheikh Ali, one of a small number of liberal lawmakers in Iraq's parliament. "Dismiss them? Cut their salaries? Take away their guns? The answer is there's nothing we can do. Because they will be a second power to the state."

Shia occupation

"Daesh", says the red spray paint scrawled on the walls of house after house along the road in northern Diyala province, about 100 miles northeast of the capital, using the Arabic acronym for Isis. After the months-long struggle to dislodge Isis from the province, militiamen accompanied by a local official drove along the route, identifying the houses of collaborators. "These people won't be able to return to their homes," says a soldier.

Back at the nearby base, General Ali Hossein Wazir al-Shammari describes how Shia militiamen worked hand-in-hand with his soldiers to dislodge Isis from the region. They now work together to prevent Isis from returning and to monitor the activities of locals he accused of collaborating with jihadis. "At the beginning, the people of the villages prepared bread for them," he says. "They hung our soldiers by their feet. They beheaded civilians suspected of working with the soldiers."

Some Iraqi politicians and western commentators equate the actions of Shia militias and Isis, but this underplays Isis's brutality. Shia atrocities documented by human rights groups and journalists are nowhere near on the scale of Isis, which executed hundreds of captured Iraqi soldiers in a single day in Tikrit last year and bragged about it.

Isis foreign fighters film themselves beheading other foreigners and burning people alive, while Iranian commander General Qassem Soleimani - who advises and, some say, oversees military operations against Isis - posts photos of himself kissing Iraqi babies on social media. "In reality, you can compromise and have a dialogue with the militias," said Sheikh Hekmat Suleiman, a Sunni politician and adviser to the government on Anbar province. "There is no dialogue with [Isis]."

But Iraq's sectarian hostilities run deep. Saddam Hussein and his Sunni predecessors sought to dilute the power of Iraq's Shia majority by encouraging Sunni to settle in a belt around Baghdad. Today, the Shia armed groups overseeing Sunni areas create an atmosphere of vindictive occupation.

Mr Jenabi, the murdered tribal leader, lived in an area south of Baghdad that had been targeted by what appeared to be a sectarian cleansing campaign that included mass arrests, home demolitions and the closing of irrigation canals. "The militias cut off the water," Mr Jenabi told the Financial Times in September. "The militias took all of our weapons, and even the army does not dare challenge them."

Spurts of violence aside, it is the gross imbalances of sectarian power within Iraq's security system - and their amplification after Isis's arrival last year - that will have the deepest and most lasting impact on Iraq.

"When they put their hands in their pockets, I'm afraid they're going to pull out a grenade," says Hamid el-Yasseri, the leader of a Shia fighting group, just moments after leaving a conversation with a group of older Sunni men. "All their sons are with the terrorists."

The same comments could have been made by a US army officer during the American occupation that began 12 years ago.

A popular surge

Shia militiamen, many with training or funding from Iran, emerged as an important force in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. But after peaking in the late 2000s, their influence began to wane, especially after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared a war to crush them in southern Iraq.

The rise of Isis and the subsequent edict by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iran's highest-ranking Shia cleric, calling on all young men to volunteer to fight the group allowed them to re-enter Iraq's security institutions.

Estimates of the total numbers of men fighting as part of the so-called popular mobilisation units vary from 50,000 to 100,000, as does the balance between numbers of militiamen and bona fide volunteers.

An official of the powerful Iranian-backed Badr Organisation militia, led by former transport minister Hadi Ameri, estimates that the number of recruits in Diyala province doubled to 12,000 in the 10 months after Isis's June 10 takeover of Mosul. "The Shia volunteers who are organised based on Sistani's call have played an important role at least to stop Isis," said a high-ranking Iraqi official. "These are the genuine ones. There are other groups who are more organised militias who are also trying to make use of this. This is the problem."

The militias have grown so powerful that they have begun to eclipse not only the armed forces and the army of genuine volunteers, but also the government itself. Despite entreaties by both the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Ayatollah Sistani, who has issued multiple statements spelling out in detail how Iraqi soldiers and militiamen are to conduct themselves on the battlefield, allegations of abuses continue, ranging from unverified video footage showing Iraqi soldiers murdering civilians to well-documented reports by international human rights organisations.

"The people killing us are the militias," Mr Jenabi said in the interview months before his death. "They say they are the government. But they won't show themselves or announce themselves. I assure you if we go to where they are, they will kill us."

Mr Yasseri, whose volunteer unit is manning the front against Isis in Sunni Anbar province, says he realised the power of the militias after criticising the role of Iran and the armed groups it supported during a meeting with Mr Abadi.

"'Be careful - they will kill you,'" he claims the prime minister quietly warned him afterward.

The art of killing

Every fighter at the Badr Organisation training camp is eager to pose for pictures, save the trainer speaking Lebanese-accented Arabic. "Point the camera away," he demands.

Isis and the Shia militias are in no ways mirror images of each other, buta curious symmetry is developing between the two camps. Just as Isis recruits foreign fighters from across the Middle East to bolster its ranks, so too have the militias brought aboard Iranians and possible Lebanese Hizbollah militiamen, though "as advisers not as fighters," concedes Mr Ameri, the commander of the Badr, in an interview.

Faced with the ingenious brutality of Isis booby traps - improvised explosives set inside refrigerators stocked with food or attached to coveted weapons gripped by dead fighters - Mr Yasseri's men near Falloujah have begun building their own deadly bombs.

In one scheme, they rig an oxygen tank to an explosive device and lure the Isis fighters towards it. "There were six or seven of them," says Mr Yasseri, with relish. "When they were close we set it off."

Just as Isis has been accused of massacres to terrorise civilian populations into submission or displacement, so too have the Shia militias been implicated in murders with sectarian overtones. Human Rights Watch alleged militiamen attached to several organisations embarked on sectarian cleansing sprees.

But while the jihadi group proudly publicises its massacres, Shia militias commit their atrocities under cover of darkness. Mr Ameri vowed to refer any wrongdoers within his ranks to the judiciary. "I have taken the decision to arrest anyone who kidnaps and commits assassinations," he says.

Mr Jenabi's killers have yet to be brought to justice. According to relatives and official accounts, his abductors somehow managed to snatch him in a heavily trafficked highway and make it past perhaps a dozen checkpoints, controlled by armed forces or militias, between southern and eastern Baghdad. "It was a political message to all the Sunni politicians that we militias are here so watch what you say," a relative of Mr Jenabi says.

Mr Jenabi, who spent three years of his life in Basra's notorious US-run Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca prisons as a suspected insurgent supporter, described himself as a businessman, agriculturalist and land developer. In the interview before his death, he railed against a government he described as "a multitude of gangs and mafias" unable to protect his people from either Isis militants or Shia militias.

"They want us to leave this area," he said. "But we will never leave here, even if they cut us into pieces."

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