What is a civil war?
- 29 Nov 06, 12:26 PM
When does sectarian violence in Iraq turn into a civil war? It’s an issue we – and others – have been wrestling with for some time. This week, the US TV network NBC became the latest news organisation to describe the fighting there in such terms.
No-one who’s watched, listened to or read the accounts of BBC correspondents Andrew North, Hugh Sykes, David Loyn and others in recent weeks, could be in any doubt about the level of violence seen in Baghdad and beyond.
NBC is hardly alone in characterising what’s going on in Iraq in such terms – as early as April, Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi described it as a civil war; six weeks ago, one of the most respected US commentators, Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, said he too was in no doubt that Iraq was in a civil war. The murder of more than 200 people when Sunni Muslim insurgents blew up five car bombs and fired mortars into Baghdad's largest Shiite district last Thursday, suggests they might be right.
Harvard professor Monica Toft suggests there are six objective criteria all modern civil wars share:
- the struggle for power over which group governs the country;
- at least two organised, armed, groups of combatants;
- that the “state” is formally involved in the fighting;
- the intensity of the conflict;
- that the two groups are each taking significant numbers of casualties;
- and that the fighting is within the boundaries of a single country.
She believes Iraq meets all six. But I wonder if describing it as such, really aids our understanding of what’s going on?
The fighting in Iraq defies simple categorisation. There are at least two other dimensions to the situation there. In Anbar province, the violence in places like Fallujah and Ramadi is driven by the original insurgency against the US-led occupation. Anbar is a Sunni stronghold – the targets, by and large, are not Shia Muslims, but American servicemen and women.
Further south, a third battle emerges – fighting between rival Shia militias. The two most powerful are the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army, linked respectively to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Moqtada al-Sadr, the leaders of the two largest blocs in Iraq's coalition government. These militia vie with each other for power, in tit-for-tat assassinations and drive-by shootings that have become a regular feature of life in places like Basra. It’s this battle that British troops in the south of Iraq often find themselves caught up in
There is no single picture in Iraq – no single term can do justice to the complexity of what’s going on there. For now, we’ve decided not to use the term civil war – not because the situation isn’t bad, nor life for those involved increasingly difficult. Others will continue to describe it as a “civil war” – we’ll continue to report their comments with attribution. But it’s precisely because things are critical, that we need to explain and provide the context – something, one simple phrase can never do.
Jon Williams is the BBC's world news editor
