States do not fight wars in the same ways or with the same consequences as in the past. Civilians are increasingly the victims of new and contemporary wars. While repressive forms of crime against civilians prevailed in the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, economic crimes against civilians became more common during the post-invasion Coalition occupation. The crimes of the past Iraq regime set a foundation of sectarian fear and conflict that was released by the US-led invasion and which, in turn, led to rampant crimes against civilians and their property. The research will assess this sequence with three surveys that include more than 9,000 personal interviews conducted before and after the regime change in Iraq. We will assess whether a sequence unfolded in which ethno-sectarian strong state repression and deprivation was followed in Iraq by a weak state in which fears about safety, protection, and resource needs in turn caused extensive sectarian looting and violent crime by gangs and militias. We will more specifically examine whether the wave of violent crimes that peaked in 2005-6 also elevated ethno-sectarian crimes against property to peak levels. The interview accounts will be used to elaborate and illustrate statistical findings. There is little past analysis of property losses during the occupation of Iraq. Yet the loss of household and business wealth is assumed to be extensive, especially for Iraq?s more than four million displaced persons. Previous work predicts that breakdown in state control over crime and violence is most extensive in mixed community settings. This is likely because conflict increases as contesting groups come into close residential contact or in other ways. The research will test such predictions in the post-invasion neighborhoods of Baghdad. We predict that the lower the proportion of the largest ethnic group in a post-invasion neighborhood, and therefore the greater the ethno-sectarian mix, the higher the level of property and person crime. We further predict that a redistribution of wealth in Iraq first began to emerge during a preliminary looting stage (2003-5), then peaked with the rise of violent crimes against persons in a second stage (2005-6), and finally declined in its volume but not in its re-distributional consequences in the third period of the Surge (2007). The combination of data sets available for this research allows a unique case study of the sectarian and economic consequences of violent crime in a transition from a strong to weak state. This is a kind of transition that may be increasingly replacing older forms of military conflict.
Broader Impacts: Contemporary wars may be less consequential for military targets than they are for the health and socio-economic well-being of civilian victims. These losses and transfers of wealth can be especially devastating for some while presenting enormous opportunities for others. It is important in developing our understanding to document and explain ethno-sectarian aspects of the redistribution of wealth in settings such as Iraq. This understanding is essential to explaining how these conflicts disrupt and destroy opportunities for growth and development where it often is needed most. Traditional militaristic approaches to the understanding of war in a changing world of international development and destruction are often outdated. The primary goal of this case study in Iraq is to increase our understanding of the socio-economic consequences of crimes against civilians and their property, elements that increasingly characterize modern day warfare.
" Battle for Baghdad, 2003-2007 We set out to examine pre- and post-invasion crimes against civilians using information derived from Gallup and Iraq History Project surveys which included more than 10,000 personal interviews conducted before and after the regime change in Iraq in 2003. The primary goal of our case study was to increase our understanding of crimes against civilians and their property in Iraq. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq intensified a suppressed sectarian split between Arab Sunni and Shia groups. This split was set in motion during Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian and Sunni Baathist dominated government mistreatment of the larger Shia population of Iraq. Following the invasion, the U.S. governance strategy favored elite Shia groups and former exiles, such as Nuri Maliki and his Dawa Party. It excluded former Baathist and suspect Sunni leaders from Saddam’s era, as well as the dissident Shia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr. Al-Sadr gained a parliamentary role only after leveraging his large Sadrist movement with Mahdi Army led violence and tactical retreats. State and non-state forces do not fight wars in the same ways or with the same consequences as in the past. Civilians are increasingly involved as perpetrators and victims of new and contemporary wars. Crimes against civilians were widespread during the post-invasion Coalition occupation of Iraq, with attacks by internal militias like the Mahdi Army as well as Al Qaeda further intensifying nascent conflicts between Shia and Sunni groups. Thus Iraq has a long history of internal sectarian conflict that was released and intensified following the US-led invasion. Our research project assessed the post-invasion conflict with several surveys which included information on distinct areas and neighborhoods across Iraq and its capital city of Baghdad. We focused in particular on early post-invasion fear of violence and resulting displacement in Baghdad. An important part of our research involved examining the compositional consequences of the division in sectarian group identity at the neighborhood level in Baghdad and how the configuration of these neighborhoods and their sectarian compositions influenced the occurrence of crimes against property and persons in the subsequent post-invasion and occupation period. We identified 25 Baghdad neighborhoods for analysis by combining information from the 2003 Gallup Baghdad post-invasion survey with the 2003-2007 Iraq History Project’s Current Violations interviews about human rights abuses in Baghdad. We used these respective datasets to show how fear and uncertainty prefigured and motivated self-fulfilling, neighborhood-specific forces that followed the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Neighborhoods that reported high levels of fear in 2003 were also the same neighborhoods that reported high levels of displacement three years later. We measured the fear reported right after the invasion in 2003. We found that fear measured in 2003 in our combined datasets predicted where displacement was most likely to occur in 2006. Ordinary Iraqis were victims of a self-reinforcing and "self-fulfilling prophecy of fear" that created the momentum for massive sectarian displacement in the battle for Baghdad. We found that one particularly violent group, the Mahdi Army, mobilized through the coercive entrepreneurship of Muqtada al-Sadr, used organized crime tactics of killing, torture, rape, kidnapping, harassment, threats, and forced displacement in a widespread and systematic attack against civilians that forced Sunni residents from their Baghdad neighborhoods. The Mahdi Army changed the neighborhood demography of Baghdad and helped leverage al-Sadr and his movement into Iraq politics and governance, serving to extend a particular vision of Shia influence in the remaking of the Iraq state.
