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Changing Conflict, March 13,2006 |
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Nature of conflict changing for Iraqis
Sectarian violence, not insurgency, now greatest threat to life.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com, March 13, 2006 at 10:50 a.m.
As the third anniversary of the start of the invasion of Iraq nears, the nature of the conflict is changing for Iraqis. The greatest danger is no longer the insurgency, reports The Washington Post, but the threat of sectarian violence, which increases almost daily. Increasingly, lines are being drawn – literally – between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.
Baghdad has calmed since the mosque bombing, partly because the city's nightly curfew was moved up three hours to 8 p.m. But Baghdad and Iraq have nevertheless begun to look like Lebanon during that country's 15-year civil war. Green lines and red lines have sprung up between neighborhoods, and complex rivalries have grown among myriad factions pursuing political aims with armed militias. ...
Checkpoints set up by Iraqi security forces now mark the otherwise imperceptible boundaries between some neighborhoods. Uniformed gunmen from Iraq's many ambiguous and shifting security forces and militias scan passing traffic, sticking their heads in rolled-down windows to question motorists, in search of anyone who looks like an outsider and a possible threat.
In one sign of the growing public nature of this violence, the Los Angeles Times reports that the head of Iraq's public TV network, Al-Iraqiya, was ambushed and killed Saturday. The network is indirectly controlled by the Shiite-led government. But it appears the murder was in retaliation for the killing four days earlier of Munsuf Abdallah Khalidi, a news anchor on Baghdad Television, which is run by the country's largest Sunni Arab party.
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The Los Angeles Times reports that the growing power of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Madhi Army, causes great concern among US officials. Many see the only way that the US time in Iraq will be considered a success is if they leave behind a stable government, but Sadr's growing power is a danger to that hope.
"The true nightmare in Iraq is not Anbar," the province that is the hotbed of the Sunni-led insurgency, "it's Basra," said a high-level U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's neighborhood by neighborhood, police station by police station, collectives of quasi-political, quasi-criminal gangs, who may use a label that has a national color to it but in reality isn't national at all. And it's the intermingling of criminality and the push for individual power, all blended into one."
The BBC reports that Britain's Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, admits that the situation in Iraq is "a mess," but argues that Iraq's prospects are better than media reports suggest. He also dismissed reports of civil war, and said that while Iraq may be a mess, it's "a mess that can't launch an attack now on Iran; a mess that won't be able to march into Kuwait; it's a mess that can't develop nuclear weapons." He also took a swipe at conservative figures in the US who have complained about the direction of the war.
"I would never take my guidance from swivel-eyed right-wing Americans and I'm surprised that anybody ever did. I do not look to them to continue the fight for democracy and to rebuild a nation in Iraq any more than I would look at some left-wing loony," he said.
"This is a job that has to be done; these are the materials we have got to deal with; and they are great materials. We've just got to get on with it now."
But John Burns, who has been the New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad for four years and was one of the few journalists to remain in the capital during the US invasion, paints a completely different picture of the situation. Editor & Publisher reports that Mr. Burns, appearing on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, said that for the first time, he believes the US mission in Iraq "will fail."
Asked if a civil war was developing there, Burns said, "It's always been a civil war," adding that it's just a matter of extent. He said the current US leaders there – military and diplomatic – were doing their best but sectarian differences would "probably" doom the enterprise.
Burns said that he and others underestimated this problem, feeling for a long time that toppling Saddam Hussein would almost inevitably lead to something much better. He called the Abu Ghraib abuse the worst of many mistakes the US made but said that even without so many mistakes the sectarian conflict would have gotten out of hand.
Burns said the US military officials in Iraq will be deciding over the next couple of weeks if they should draw down US forces in Iraq this spring. With conditions on the ground deteriorating, it could lead to chaos in Iraq, but if the troops are not brought back "it would prove to be a political disaster for the White House."
A secret study by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service seems to support concerns about early withdrawal from Iraq. The Toronto Star reports that unless Iraq first had a stable government, insurgents would see the removal of US troops as a "significant victory." The CSIS study says the insurgents are working hard to exploit the differences between the various factions in Iraq and that the "spectrum of instability" in Iraq includes "high levels of criminal activity, civil unrest, increased sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, regular guerrilla action against allied forces, assaults on Iraqi authorities, sabotage, kidnapping and assassination."
The spy service notes some observers have argued that rather than prompt a descent into civil war, an American pullout may pacify anti-U.S. elements, impair the recruiting efforts of the insurgents and give the Iraqi state a new sense of purpose.
"However, without having clearly established a stable democratic government, insurgents will likely perceive a U.S. withdrawal as a significant victory," the study adds.
The Associated Press reports that, after a meeting with US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Iraqi leaders announced that the parliament would convene three days earlier than planned. Officials also announced that meetings to break the deadlock over the forming of a new government would continue. Khalilzad said a permanent government needed to be in place quickly because of the continuing effort by "terrorists to provoke sectarian conflict. To deal with the need on an urgent basis [we must] form a government of national unity."
The Sydney Morning Herald reported last week, however, that Abdul Karim al-Enzy, Iraq's national security minister, took a swipe at the US for interfering in Iraq's internal affairs. He said the US was intentionally slowing Iraq's redevelopment because of "a self-serving agenda that included oil and the 'war on terror.'"
Mr. Enzy argued that if the US-led coalition in Iraq had been more serious about rebuilding the country's security forces in the first year of the occupation, it could now be making substantial cuts in foreign troop numbers in Iraq. "We don't want foreign forces here, but it's impossible for them to leave now, because we're on the edge of civil war," he said.
"The truth is the Americans don't want us to reach the levels of courage and competence needed to deal with the insurgency because they want to stay here. They came for their own strategic interests. A lot of the world's oil is in this region and they want to use Iraq as a battlefield in the war on terror because they believe they can contain the terrorism in Iraq."
Enzy said Iraq and the region's relationship with the West was complicated by "significant differences of culture and tradition."
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http://zfacts.com/p/251.html | 01/18/12 07:26 GMT
Modified: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:48:50 GMT
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