The Iraqi sheikh who wants the British ‘to stand by us’
Sheikh Mustafa Jboori wears a belt around his long white jelabia robe to provide a place for his revolver. Over these years of turmoil in Iraq he has grown used to having it close at all times – there have been at least eight assassination attempts against him.
Before it was al-Qaeda who wanted to kill him but now he fears Shi’a militia associated with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“I’m not afraid for myself,” he told me as we sat under a linden tree in his huge, green garden. “But I fear those Shi’a militia might try to kill my daughter.”
The sheikh heads the Jboori tribe in Baghdad’s southern suburb of Doura, a no-go area under the control of al-Qaeda during Iraq’s sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007. On the way to his house we passed a flattened industrial unit in the reed-fringed farmland.
“That was an al-Qaeda car bomb factory,” explained our guide. “The Americans destroyed it in an air raid in 2007.”
Patriots alongside terrorists
Back then, Sheikh Jboori led 7,500 members of his tribe in battle against the jihadis as part of the US sponsored Awakening Council movement. It was one of the few successes of US policy in Iraq – by working with Sunni sheikhs, paying their young men to fight al-Qaeda and encouraging rapprochement with the Shi’a dominated government, they managed to crush al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Now, however, the jihadis are back. When the Americans pulled out of Iraq in 2011, the government of Nouri al-Maliki stopped paying the Awakening Council sheikhs. Sunni officers were purged from the army and replaced with Shi’as, whether they were competent or not. Goodwill ebbed away. The government grew cruel and corrupt.
Sheikh Jboori has not gone onto the side of Isis, the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, which has seized much of north western Iraq, but he understands fellow Sunnis who have.
“There are terrorists in Mosul but also patriots who want to protect their area and their country,” he told me. “They’re not terrorists. We need to call on these honourable patriots instead of the Shi’a militia.”
The US Secretary of State John Kerry seems to agree. Publicly he says it’s up to Iraqis to choose their new Prime Minister. Privately he’s made it clear that the US will not help the Iraqi army by bombing Isis positions unless Maliki is replaced by a less divisive figure. The solution is political not military.
With traditional Iraqi hospitality, Sheikh Jaboori plied us with fresh bread, roasted chicken and pickles. He believes that the British and the Americans should come to Iraq’s aid – not for him the resentment and anger of many Iraqis who see occupation as the problem. The current crisis, he said, is worse than 2006/7 and “a hundred times worse than Saddam Hussein.”
“Please give the Queen a special message from me,” he said. “We need the British to help us. You must stand by us in this dangerous time.”
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