Saddam's return in Iraq

It was a strange movement, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In post-occupation Iraq it was al-Qaeda, growing steadily with international participation and constantly on the agenda with its ruthless and sensational actions. Not in government, of course, but by its influence it exercised its sway as a nightmare that had descended upon the government.

Its strangeness lay in its surprising and inconsistent behavior, which quickly overturned every opinion that had formed about it so far and gave no opportunity for a stock notion of it to form.

It is known as Salafi but can quite well form alliances with Sufis as well. It says Sharia, but the performance it has shown in the name of Sharia so far is nothing other than executions carried out with terror in the areas it has brought under its control.

Because its actions led to results that opened the way for Iran's influence in Iraq, it was thought to be linked to Iranian intelligence, yet it can also carry out actions with clear consequences against both Shiite targets and Iran's interests.

From the hour the crisis began in Syria, the movement revised its name as ISIS, entered Syria too with all its terror, and demanded that the Nusra Front, which had settled there before it and had gained a surprising degree of sympathy in the areas where it was influential, pledge allegiance to it.

Nusra, assessing a difference with ISIS in style and probably in goals, announced, in order to escape this pledge, that it was pledging allegiance directly to al-Qaeda. This was the beginning of the Nusra Front's association with al-Qaeda. ISIS, for its part, displayed its strange difference here too. In Syria it did not engage in any clashes with Assad. Instead it carried out extremely ruthless actions targeting al-Nusra, the Free Syrian Army, and also the PYD and the Turkmens. It was also known that, from the oil areas in the territories it seized, it was shipping oil to the Assad regime.

While all these circumstances increasingly reinforced the impression that ISIS was an organization acting entirely on behalf of Assad, when considered together with its style of action in Iraq they reinforced the impression that it was working for Iran.

Its seizure of Mosul within only a few days and then of many Iraqi cities made one think that the Iraqi government was abandoning all these areas to it, and hence that everything was taking place within the framework of an agreement. Yet whatever the case may be, this advance of ISIS is an event that has razed all the prestige of the Iraqi central government under the Maliki administration in a way that cannot be rebuilt. The possibility that Maliki or Iran are managing all that is happening within a plan is increasingly becoming an impossible one.

One way or another, an irregular guerrilla movement can come to take over the administration of nearly all of Iraq. The Iraqi government, which handed over the city of Mosul without firing a single bullet, will not escape being questioned on this occasion about the way it has governed Iraq up to now.

The truth is that with ISIS's latest operation we are facing an explosion of forces that the Maliki administration had been covering up or suppressing since the occupation. Indeed, the forces that have made this much progress are not merely ISIS, the al-Qaeda extension we know. Perhaps its initiator and organizer is ISIS, but within this movement there is a very broad Sunni Arab coalition. To put it more plainly, the event is also, to some extent, the return of Saddam Hussein or of the coalition he represented.

Indeed, some tribes from Mosul that have joined this movement object to this event being characterized as an ISIS movement and call the movement the "tribal committee." Indeed, Sunni tribes and officers of the Saddam era, for example Saddam's deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, are involved.

The Sunni Arabs, the most important element purged from the center of power since the day the American occupation began, had been thoroughly suffocated by Maliki's sectarian policies. Even the former Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, finding himself suddenly in the middle of a process in which he was accused of terrorism and tried for execution, had been forced to leave the country. As other Sunni leaders were likewise subjected to similar practices, the Iraqi central government had increasingly fallen into a sectarian vise.

Is it not Freud's famous saying? What is repressed eventually returns. Unfortunately, the form of return does not always resemble the realization of justice. Sometimes this return takes place by staging new tragedies.

For that reason, a movement started in Iraq by an organization like ISIS seems to have turned into a hope for the repressed. This hope is, in the end, for some, the hope of revenge for the sufferings they went through in a war that cost the lives of a million people. For some, it is the hope of regaining the positions or means they lost.

It must be seen that with its general mode of action ISIS is somehow also appealing to certain other hopes that exist in the minds of the masses in the Middle East. Even if it is represented in its most vandal and savage form, even if it is nothing but a slogan, the "demand for Sharia" appeals to the masses.

We need to reassess what kind of propaganda effect bulldozing the border between Syria and Iraq can have, and what kind of associations and motivations the declaration that the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot are void and the claim of abolishing the national borders between Muslim countries have for certain masses. We must not overlook that these associations and motivations are, in the end, very useful and can also be used as an instrument of manipulation.