Why do some Iraqis support the Islamic State group?

The Islamic State militants have murdered, raped and choked off whole communities to the brink of starvation. So why don’t the inhabitants of the areas they control in Iraq and Syria rise up against them?

Earlier this month at the NATO summit, President Barack Obama said part of the U.S. offensive against the group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is “a strong strategic communications effort so that we are discouraging people from thinking somehow that ISIL represents a state, much less a caliphate.”

He expressed more during his prime-time address to the nation Wednesday night: “Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state.”

So how do they gain traction and what can be done to change the minds of those who support them, even tacitly?

Many Sunni Muslims oppose the Sunni extremist Islamic State group, and some are fighting alongside government forces to try to stop the militants from advancing to the Iraqi city of Haditha, said Nussaibah Younis, a senior research associate for the Project on Middle East Democracy and a specialist on Iraq.

Bedouin women sit outside houses they are currently living in at a settlement in the Hurran Valley near the town of Haditha, northwest of Baghdad on April 19, 2009. Photo by Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images

But, she said, some elements of the Iraqi Sunni community do support the militant group because they feel they are being persecuted by the Iraqi state. “They see the Iraqi government as a Shiite, sectarian government. They feel humiliated by the Shiite-dominated security forces, and there was a lot of anger about Sunnis being arbitrarily imprisoned without charge. Many were tortured, and some were arrested just so that bribes could be extracted from their families.”

In 2013, there were massive protests against the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki across Sunni parts of Iraq, said Younis. “After they failed to produce serious reform in Baghdad, some participants of the protests became radicalized. One senior sponsor of the protests told me in early 2013 that if the protests failed, Iraq’s Sunnis would join with the oppressed Sunnis of Syria and together take down both Maliki and (Syrian President Bashar) al-Assad,” she said.

“It was when former Prime Minister Maliki shut down the protests in Sunni parts of Iraq that (the Islamic State) started to make territorial gains in Iraq.”

The key to turning those sentiments around is the new Iraqi government, which was sworn in on Monday, doing “everything it can to persuade the remainder of Iraq’s Sunnis to join the fight against IS,” said Younis.

But how does it do that? “By persuading them that they have a future in Iraq, and by meeting their demands to treat them as equal, full citizens, and by allowing them control over local government, security and policing in their own areas,” she said.

Major Gen. Najim Abed al-Jabouri, the former mayor of Tal Afar, Iraq, who now lives in the United States, said Sunnis don’t “like” the extremists. “But the enemy of my enemy is sometimes my friend,” he said of their way of thinking.

Major Gen. Najim Abed al-Jabouri, former mayor of Tal Afar. Photo by Larisa Epatko/PBS NewsHour

Al-Jabouri, a Sunni, had to leave Iraq in 2008 after al-Qaida terrorists tried to kill him. They ended up destroying his home. He is now a fellow at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C., which is funded by the Department of Defense.

“If they compare between the government and IS, sometimes they see IS better than the government,” he said recently from his office. “The Iraqi security forces killed many people. In Tal Afar, my city, I heard the soldiers killed the prisoners before they left. This makes the Sunnis deal with IS. But that doesn’t mean they like them.” IS fighters now control most of Tal Afar.

According to Younis, many Sunnis now fear that they will all be treated as though they were members of IS and are afraid that the defeat of IS will lead to their massacre.

“This is exacerbated by the fact that Shiite militias have been playing a leading role in the fight against IS and have been reportedly killing local Sunnis and torching Sunni property,” she said.

Now, said Younis, it is critical that Iraq’s new political leadership “regularize its armed effort against IS, and where possible allow Sunnis to lead the fight against IS with sensitivity to the local populations whose hearts and minds are at the center of this battle.”

A previous engagement of Sunni tribesmen, in the coalition called the Sunni Awakening, helped counter al-Qaida in the mid-2000s and brought security to parts of Iraq where the insurgents had been in control. But after the U.S. military withdrew, the Iraqi Shiite-led government stopped paying the Sunni Awakening members and even went back to fighting them.

Because the fabric between Iraq’s religious and ethnic groups has been so damaged, al-Jabouri said, the new government must make sure no one is outside the law and that jobs are accessible to everyone, not just preferred groups.

“We need national leaders, not sectarian leaders,” he said. “Our problem is the head, not the people.”

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