67 2 SECTARIAN RELATIONS AND SUNNI IDENTITY IN POST-CIVIL WAR IRAQ Fanar Haddad* Introduction No other event—not even the Iranian Revolution of 1979—has had as momentous and detrimental an efect on sectarian relations in the Middle East as the war and occupation of Iraq in 2003. 1 In Iraq itself, * I would like to thank the indefatigable Laith al-Yasiri and Amir al-Yasiri for their extraordinary eforts in helping me secure sources in Baghdad. Similarly my grati- tude goes to Dr Hassan al-Haddad and Ameer al-Sa‘adi for their help. My thanks also to Reidar Visser, Mark Farha, and to all the participants in the “Sectarian Politics in the Gulf Working Group” for their comments and input. 1 hroughout this essay, “sectarian relations” will be used to refer to Sunni–Shi‘i relations. Rather than a deinitional stance, this merely relects my research inter- ests and the subject at hand. he term “sectarianism” appears in quotation marks throughout, the reason being that the term has no deinitive meaning. Until we are able to deine “sectarianism,” a more coherent way of addressing the issue would be to use the term “sectarian” followed by the appropriate suix: sectarian hate; sectarian unity; sectarian discrimination, and so forth.