Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict
Diego Gambetta (ed.), Thomas Hegghammer (ed.)
Published:
2024
Online ISBN:
9780191802454
Print ISBN:
9780198739470
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Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict
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Stephen Holmes, PhD
Pages
205–246
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Published:
April 2024
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Holmes, Stephen, 'Mimicry and Its Double in the Iraqi Civil War', in Diego Gambetta, and Thomas Hegghammer (eds), Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict (
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Abstract
The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 sparked one of the most violent and complex civil wars in the early twenty-first century, one that provided ample opportunities and incentives for identity mimicry. This chapter uses the Iraqi civil war of 2006–2008 to understand the many forms that mimicry can take and the effects it may have in a modern conflict setting. It offers detailed descriptions of a wide range of defensive and aggressive mimicry tactics employed by all sides in the conflict as well as the counter-strategies they inspired. A striking feature of the Iraqi mimicry landscape was the phenomenon of policemen pretending to be members of sectarian death squads pretending to be policemen, a type of meta-mimicry intended to conceal the actual involvement of policemen in sectarian killings. Mimicry likely contributed to, and was subsequently somewhat reduced by, the sorting of Sunnis and Shiites into separate areas and to the retrenchment of the US presence into heavily fortified bases.
Keywords: deception, mimicry, Iraq, Middle East, al-Qaida, civil war, insurgency, sectarianism, police, US military
Subject
Military History Sociology Political Theory
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
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