A few months ago, Thomas Friedman claimed that, "Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and they are indifferent to their brutalization (NYT, May 18, 2005)." Friedman's basic assumption is that Sunnis, or Iraqis in general, have no legitimate reason to fight against the US occupation forces or their new Iraqi allies. Instead, the Sunni dominated Iraqi resistance is fighting purely out of intense religiously motivated hatred for Shiites. By this logic virtually all Sunni Iraqis must be against the U.S./Iraqi Government, while at the same time virtually all Shiite Iraqis would support the U.S./Iraqi Government. If this were the case, it would of course seem necessary for the U.S. army to remain in Iraq to help the long oppressed Shiites defeat their long time Sunni oppressors.

Though the situation in this country is incredibly complex, and I certainly can't claim to know what's going on here with any surety, I have spoken with a few people whose opinions lead me to doubt the accuracy of Friedman's statement. I recently met a man whose brother, Muhammad, was killed several months ago after Iraqi National Guard (ING) and American forces raided his home. Muhammad was 67-years old, educated in England, and previously an officer in the Iraqi Army, though he had left the Army 27 years ago. He was religious and had drafted and proposed an Islamic constitution for Iraq after the American invasion of 2003. One night last December, around 1:15 am, American and ING forces surrounded his home and opened fire on his house. When the firing stopped, Muhammad's wife allowed the ING to enter the home, after which they immediately shot Muhammad. The bullets destroyed his reproductive organs, shattered his hip, and exited the other side of his body. The ING then took Muhammad to a hospital, where he died four days later. The doctors told the family that ING forces had kept a hood over Muhammad's head and prevented the doctors from speaking with him. Though Muhammad was Iraqi, his death certificate from the hospital declared he was a Saudi national. Twenty-three days after the home was raided, Muhammad's family received a letter from the ING, informing them of his death and asking them to claim the body. The letter stated that ING soldiers shot Muhammad because he resisted arrest, though the family insists he did not. Muhammad's brother stated that, "My brother had only one sin. He rejected the occupation." The letter sent to Muhammad's family also indicated that the ING unit that raided Muhammad's home was Battalion 301, which, according to Muhammad's brother, is a unit from the Badr Brigade, a private Shiite militia belonging to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the main Shiite political parties in the current Iraqi government. This Badr Brigade unit and others are allegedly being incorporated into the Iraqi National Guard under U.S., rather than Iraqi government supervision. For example, the ING units, which currently patrol much of the Sunni city of Falluja are also from the Badr Brigade.

Because the Shiite Badr Brigade had killed Muhammad, and because he and his family were against the US occupation, I imagined that Muhammad and his brother must be Sunni, as the Sunni versus Shiite framework presented by Friedman would predict. As a result, after the brother told me the story of Muhammad's death, I asked him what he thought about the idea that the Sunnis are fighting against the U.S. and the current Iraqi government out of some kind of racism or because they can't stand to see the Shiites in power after decades of Sunni rule. To this Muhammad's brother simply responded, "I am Shiite." So here was an example of violence that did not occur along sectarian fault lines as expected. Instead, Shiites collaborating with the occupiers killed a fellow Shiite resisting the occupiers.

A few weeks later, I had a conversation with a man named Salaam, who was also a former soldier in the Iraqi Army, and has been retired for close to a decade. I spoke to Salaam the day after he had attended the funeral of a good friend, who had been killed in a terrorist car bombing. When I asked him what he thought of the American military presence in Iraq, he responded with a rhetorical question I have now heard many times, "would you like you're country to be occupied?" He was glad Saddam is gone, but objected to any characterization of Iraq as a "liberated" country. He felt there was no difference between the Americans and the terrorists. Both are killing people and destroying the country. He described the members of the new Iraqi government as "thieves."

Once again because of Salaam's anti-occupation sentiments, I assumed throughout the conversation that he was Sunni, and, just as before, asked his opinion of Friedman's comments. He said that though there is some tension between Sunni and Shiites, the kind of discrimination described by Friedman does not exist. Finally at the end of the conversation I thought I should confirm that he was Sunni. I asked, "Salaam, you're a Sunni, right?" To which he replied, "No, I am Shiite."

So why is the Iraqi resistance fighting? I'm not sure anyone really knows with certainty, and there are probably a combination of reasons. But if the U.S. backed Shiite Iraqi forces have to kill fellow Shiites that oppose the occupation, and even Shiites whose friends have been killed in terrorist attacks oppose the occupation, this would indicate that there would be plenty of Iraqis, both Sunni and Shiite, who are willing to fight the occupiers and their Iraqi allies, not out of any hatred for Shiites, but for hatred of the occupation. Perhaps, some of the insurgents, particularly the foreigners, are fighting for sectarian reasons as Friedman claims. But with so many Shiites, let alone Sunnis, who oppose the occupation and new Iraqi government, it would be shocking to me if much, if not most of the resistance, were fighting for nationalist, rather than sectarian reasons. As another Shiite I met the other day put it, "If a foreign army comes to your country, you should fight them. This has been true for thousands of years."