A poster of General Abd al-Karim Qasim in Samawah. April 2017. Christopher Lamont. All rights reserved.The recent independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan and its fallout is another reminder of the challenges of building a shared identity that Iraqis face as the Islamic State threat recedes.
With deep Sunni alienation, tensions rising over the fate of Kirkuk, and a myriad of Shia militia gaining increasing sway over the Shia heartlands of southern Iraq, there seems little reason for optimism for the future of an Iraqi state.
Under the shadow of an impossibly fractured polity, post-ISIL imperatives such as reconstruction and refugee and internally displaced person return will take years, but dealing with what it means to be Iraqi is perhaps just as much an imperative as bricks and mortar reconstruction if Iraq is to emerge from the shadow of conflict as a viable state.
