Welcome to the age of the Shiite

Since at least 1980, the Sunnis of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran have been brutally suppressed

Ramzi hails from a family of notable Iraqi Sunnis. At the University of Baghdad, he played the guitar and met my Shiite cousin. They both graduated from the School of Engineering with honors, tied the knot, and raised two children. During the Saddam years, when thugs ruled, Ramzi served in the military draft and kept a low profile.

With the outbreak of the civil war in 2007 and the rise in violence, Ramzi moved his family out of Iraq. In exile, he overstretched his resources and had to dip into his emergency reserves by selling part of the vast real estate that his ancestors had owned for centuries.

Iraq’s Shiite militias, however, had other ideas. They occupied his property and made it impossible for him to sell. They called Ramzi a Baathist and an Islamist terrorist, and used this pretext to justify their theft. A refined Sunni who disdains the uncultured Baathists and the wacko Islamists, Ramzi was now lumped in with both. The percentage of Sunnis in Baghdad has dropped from 25% in 2004 to 12% today. Trends suggest further Sunni erosion.

Welcome to the Age of the Shiite. If you are a Sunni who lives in the land that stretches between the Lebanese coast and the Iranian-Afghan border, you are doomed. If you are a secular Sunni, you must be a Baathist and you deserve the same punishment as Nazi war criminals. If you are a Sunni who sympathizes with Islamist parties, you must either be with the Muslim Brotherhood or Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, all of which are terrorist. If you are a Sunni who has spent any time in the Gulf, you must be a Wahhabi with unacceptably austere views on religion.

Since at least 1980, the Sunnis of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran – in their various political incarnations – have been brutally suppressed.

In 1982, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad decimated the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama because they dared to challenge his absolute autocracy. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam Hussein and his regime were deservedly subjected to painful sanctions for his foolish invasion of Kuwait. Saddam was toppled in 2003, and Iraq’s Sunnis have been hunted down by Shiite militias ever since. A year later, one of the most moderate Sunni political leaders, Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri, was brutally assassinated in Beirut for defying Assad and his Lebanese Shiite allies. Hariri’s Sunni lieutenants were later killed while his son and successor Saad was forced into exile.

Iraq’s Sunnis have been the only ones able to project power. In 2007, America correctly enlisted this power to eject Al-Qaeda from Iraq. But America later committed a grave error by handing the Sunni victory, not to Sunnis, but to their Shiite opponents, who went back to oppressing the Sunnis, thus undoing previous successes.

In mistreating the Sunnis, Iran and Shiites are doing themselves a disfavor. Shiites cannot kill their way out of this crisis. They cannot rule the Sunnis by force, just as Sunnis were never able in the past to sideline the Shiites. Shiites and Sunnis have to talk, and either split their nations or rebuild their flimsy partnership.

For his part, President Barack Obama does not understand that the Sunnis will not trust Washington again, given their experience, especially now that Obama has become the American president who courted Islamist Iran. Obama mistakenly thinks that he can enlist Shiite Iran to defeat the Sunni Islamic State (ISIS). This will only add insult to injury and drive more Sunnis into the arms of ISIS.

Obama also confuses Al-Qaeda with ISIS. The first is an international terrorist group; the second is an Islamist mutation of Saddam’s brutality with little international ambition.

Addressing Sunni injustice is the key to solving the ISIS problem. The absence of moderate Saad Hariri will only give way to more Sunnis joining radical groups. Washington should try to guarantee his safety so that he returns to Beirut, and not on Hezbollah’s terms.

Iraq’s Sunnis are facing ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias and government forces. This must stop. And as long as Shiites have non-government militias, Sunnis will not settle for the formation of army battalions that are controlled by the Shiite government. Either every Iraqi sect gets a militia, or they all join an army controlled by a national unity government.

Syria’s Sunnis are the weakest; half of them living in refugee tents. Their political and military leadership is inexperienced, which gave the Iraqis a chance to take over.

Sunnis will remain in a dire situation. Ramzi’s resources will remain strained and he might have to give up land that his family has owned for generations, only because he is Sunni. But he is lucky he does not live in a tent.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Alrai. He tweets @hahussain