ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Less than 24 hours after 30 people were killed in a bombing in a Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad, sectarian hashtags have been trending on Twitter, describing Sunnis as “terrorists” and calling for Sunni areas near Baghdad to be emptied.
A bomb ripped through Sadr City, a Shiite-majority part of the capital, on Monday, in an attack which would be claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS). Thirty people were killed in the attack, according to Iraq's Security Media Cell.
On Tuesday, the hashtag #Tarmiyah_blows_us_up went viral on Twitter with more than 21,000 tweets promoting a claim that the Sunni city, north of Baghdad, is an “incubator of terrorism”. Another hashtag, #ISIS_is_Sunni, has also gained traction.
Many accounts sharing the two hashtags appear to support Iran-backed militias and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF or Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic). Most accounts had pictures of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and PMF deputy commander Abu Madhi al-Muhandis, who were assassinated in Baghdad last year.
A narrative of Sunnis cooperating with ISIS has been propagated since 2014, when the terror group took control of swathes of Iraq and Syria, and has been was widely used in Iraq by Shia MPs, parties, and militia leaders.
“Today, the Shiite fighter is being slaughtered for the sake of the son of Anbar, and I am asking for balance here. When they kill seven Shiites, I want to see seven Sunnis killed as well,” Hanan al-Fatlawy, a former MP who served as a spokesperson for the state of law coalition, said in April 2014.
“A dominant narrative on Iraq especially since taking back territories from ISIS is the black and white portrayal of Sunnis as collaborators with Jihadists and Shi'a as the loyal defenders of the nation. This narrative has been advanced by the most known commentators on Iraqi politics and security both Western and Iraqi/of Iraqi origin,” journalist Rasha al-Aqeedi tweeted on Saturday.
A tweet that resurfaced on social media on Tuesday from journalist Ahmed Abdel-Sada, a prominent supporter of the PMF and militia groups, called for Tarmiyah to be “de-populated.”
“There is no solution to the chronic dilemma of terrorism in Tarmiyah except by reproducing the experience of Jurf al-Sakhar and turning it into a “de-populated area,” he tweeted in July 2020.
In May, a senior official within the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia called for displacing civilians in Sunni areas in Salahaddin and Diyala.
"The security situation in Tarmiyah and al-Mukhaisa village in Diyala will not stabilize without a reproduction of the Jurf al-Nasr experiment," Abu Ali al-Askari said in a post on Telegram.
Jurf al-Sakhar, renamed Jurf al-Naser in 2017, is a predominantly Sunni town in Babil province, central Iraq. It was evacuated of its more than 120,000 residents over the course of the war against ISIS, leaving only Iraqi security forces and the PMF in the town.
In its quarterly report on anti-ISIS operations, the Pentagon said “Shia militias oppress local Sunni populations” in Salahaddin province, another area where ISIS is active and militants take advantage of sectarian rifts.
Yassin al-Bakri, professor of political science at al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, told Rudaw English on Tuesday that the sectarian rhetoric is used by some political parties to hold onto power.
"The explosion in Sadr City yesterday is nothing but a pretext that these parties use in order to implement their agendas with their continuous attempts to bring a demographic change in Sunni areas. They are trying to continue the state of instability," Bakri said.
He added that this plot of Sunni vs Shiite has become rejected by most Iraqis, and there is no room for sectarian resurgence in Iraq because "the game has been revealed."
The PMF was established in 2014 following a fatwa – or religious call to action – from Iraq’s highest Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in order to fight ISIS.
When ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, many liberated areas fell under the control of the PMF, which includes a number of groups widely considered proxies to implement Iran’s political and military interests in Iraq, who have been accused of human rights violations, including the kidnapping and killing of activists.
