bodyguards of Finance Minister Rafie al-Issawi, who is Sunni, arrested for alleged terrorist activities on Dec. 20 — almost exactly one year after he
ordered the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi’s security detail. Hashimi fled to Turkey and is unlikely to return soon to Iraq, where he was sentenced to death after Maliki demanded his trial in absentia for murder and financing terrorism.
The threat to Issawi, a moderate technocrat from Anbar, galvanized Iraqi Sunnis, who rightly saw Maliki’s move as sectarian and an assault on government participation by Sunnis not under the prime minister’s thumb. Three days after the arrests, demonstrations broke out in Ramadi, Fallujah and Samarra. Three days after that, a large protest closed the highway from Baghdad to Syria and Jordan. The popular resistance spread to Mosul on Dec. 27.
These protests erupted during a constitutional crisis and as an expanding Arab-Kurd conflict has become increasingly militarized. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was incapacitated by a stroke on Dec. 17 and has been out of the countryfor treatment. Iraq’s constitution specifies a line of succession — but with one vice president in exile and the other a Shiite and obvious Maliki proxy, Iraq has been, in effect, operating without a president. Political processes that require presidential involvement have been paralyzed, including moving forward with long-standing efforts by Sunnis and Kurds to hold a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in Maliki.
Talabani had been the critical link holding Baghdad and Kurdistan together since tensions rose following a 10-day standoff between Iraqi army units and Kurdish pesh merga troops in October, after Maliki sent the army toward the disputed city of Kirkuk. That move followed a series of skirmishes and mobilizations along the “Green Line” separating Kurdistan from Arab Iraq and a series of attacks in the area by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The recent protests underscore the collapse of the inclusive political accommodation reached in 2007, which had been reconfirmed by the formation of a grand Sunni-Shiite-Kurd coalition government after parliamentary elections in 2010. By November 2012, Maliki had evolved
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