The April 2003 American invasion turned the Arab Sunnis, once the hegemonic group in Iraq, into a marginalised group. Further steps by the American authorities, particularly the extensive measures of de-Baathification and the ban on the Iraqi army and security forces, added more fuel to the fire, culminating in a Sunni upheaval and later Iraq's fi rst sectarian civil war (2006–8). The political process began to take root meanwhile, and the Sunnis finally joined it in 2005, voting against the approval of Iraq's permanent constitution in October and participating in the general elections of December the same year. Before 2010, Sunnis never fared well in elections. Despite that, they were pivotal in getting the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the roadmap for American withdrawal, approved by parliament in 2008. In the 2010 elections, the Sunnis voted in large numbers for a non-sectarian Shiite candidate, Iyad Allawi, only to be disappointed by his failure to establish a coalition and his eventual mishandling of the party. From this point on, Sunni politics become overtly sectarian. This chapter will delineate the Sunni perception and its limitations.

Sunni integration into the political process in Iraq has been defined as a ‘harsh readjustment’ (Zeidel 2008). Today, the shadow of a resumption of civil war is looming high as the Sunnis, politically more disunited than ever before, conduct a struggle against the Iraqi regime in Baghdad along civil, sectarian but also provincial and regional lines. Despite their delayed inclusion in the political process, Iraq's Sunnis never accepted the cause of the upheaval, namely the American invasion, and consequently do not recognise the legality of the current Iraqi government. Only the threat of yet another sectarian civil war prevents a much deeper rift between Sunnis and Shias.

Fanar Haddad (2011: 25–31) offers a useful typology of sectarian behaviours: passive, assertive and banal. Passive behaviour backgrounds sectarian identity, assertive foregrounds it (not necessarily by violent means) and banal takes it for granted, ‘like a flag hanging unnoticed on a public building’ (Billig 1995: 8). Applying that typology to Iraq's Sunnis, one can discern a movement after 2003, and even more so after 2010, from banal sectarianism to a more assertive kind.