Dulaimi
The Arab Dulaimi clan ( Arabic الدليم, DMG ad-Dulaim ; also Duleimi , English also Dulaymi or Duleymi , but actually Dulaim) belongs to the larger of the approximately 150 tribes or 1000 clans in Iraq .
Anbar stronghold
The approximately 100,000 Dulaimis or Dulaim live between ar-Rutba in the west as far as Mosul in the north and Baghdad in the east and thus also extend over Fallujah and the “Sunni triangle”. They maintain good contacts with the insurgents. In the Baghdad area they are linked by several marriages. B. with the Hashimi clan, a branch of the Sherif dynasty that ruled until 1958 . Their stronghold, however, is the province of al-Anbar with the capital Ramadi , where almost 30,000 Dulaim live. Anbar is the largest of the 18 provinces of Iraq, but mostly covered by the Syrian Desert .
Destruction and restoration of feudal tribal traditions
The Dulaim clan is largely uniformly Sunni , but ideologically and politically not homogeneous. After the “Kingdom of 1000 Sheikhs” was eliminated in 1958, national democratic and socialist governments of the republic tried to break up and smash traditional tribal structures with social reforms, urbanization and waves of arrests. However, the occupying power or the regime installed by it is trying to strengthen the power of the sheikhs again and thus to buy their loyalty.
For and against Saddam Hussein
Earlier assessments that the Dulaim clan , which once supported the Bath regime, had been critical of Saddam Hussein at least since a coup attempt and uprising in 1994/1995, have proven to be just as erroneous, as have some of the circumstances surrounding this alleged break.
In January 1995, Saddam's son Udai apparently raped the daughter of a senior Dulaim officer. When their father demanded retaliation, 38 officers of the clan were arrested and charged with planning a coup attempt and an assassination attempt on the president as early as December 1994 . Thirty of these officers were executed in May, but Air Force General Muhammad Mazlum ad-Dulaimi was promised to stay alive, according to assurances from a tribal delegation that had hurried from Ramadi to Baghdad. In June, however, his body, allegedly showing signs of torture, was handed over to the family. Thereupon the tank general Turku ad-Dulaimi decided to attack the Abu Ghraib prison in order to save at least his brother Abd al-Qasim Husain ad-Dulaimi , brigadier general of the Republican Guard , who was imprisoned there . At the same time, insurgents stormed the police station in Ramadi and armed themselves. After days of fighting over a radio station in Baghdad, the Abu Ghraib prison and the city of Ramadi, hundreds of Dulaim as well as hundreds of Bathists were killed, and Turku died by suicide . As a result, numerous Dulaim fled abroad in 1995, including Generals Jasim Muhammad Salih and Mahdi ad-Dulaimi (to Germany).
Other officers, like the Hashimi clan, remained loyal to the regime and even helped to put down the revolt. Latif Nusaif Dschasim ad-Dulaimi was Minister of Labor and Social Affairs until 1996. As recently as 2001, the CIA report listed numerous Dulaim in the rank of colonels, for example. B. Followed by the military defense of the Iraqi secret service, Chalaf Muhammad ad-Dulaimi was even a secret service general . Saadun ad-Dulaimi acted as defense minister after the fall of the Ba'ath regime in 2004-2006, while the greater part of his clan supported the Sunni insurgents. The lawyer Chalil ad-Dulaimi even headed the team of 22 defenders of Saddam Hussein.
First Minister of the Islamic World
But the best- known representative of the clan was Naziha ad-Dulaimi . The communist and chairwoman of the Iraqi Women's Association was appointed to the cabinet by Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim as Minister of Public Administration in 1959 . In 1960 she moved to the agriculture department, until 1963 as a minister with no portfolio or only minister of state. After the Bath party came to power, however, she had to go into exile and was even sentenced to death in absentia , but the Bath government took on another minister in 1972.