The weekend of violence in Iraq
Sunday was quieter than Saturday (with the horrendous suicide bombing that killed over 130 people), the death toll less, but the violence continued:
- “Four people were killed and 20 wounded Sunday when a car bomb exploded near a bus station in the town of Khalis, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) north of Baquba.”
- In Baghdad…, gunmen, bombs and mortar attacks killed 14 people and injured 46 more.”
Overall: “The Iraqi Interior Ministry estimates that about 1,000 people have been killed throughout Iraq in the past week due to gunbattles, drive-by shootings and bomb attacks.”
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Meanwhile, according to the BBC, Prime Minister Maliki has “vowed to put an end to attacks like Saturday’s deadly truck bombing in Baghdad, which he blamed on followers of ex-leader Saddam Hussein”: “We reassure the population that we will put an end to these crimes.” (A government spokesman claimed that “half of the attacks in Baghdad were carried out by extremists who came from Syria”.)
Saturday’s suicide bombing was carried out by Sunni insurgents against Shiites. Is Maliki, a Shiite close to Moqtada al-Sadr, vowing to put an end to Sunni attacks or to all attacks? And what would his reaction had been if Saturday’s attack had been carried out agaisnt Sunnis by, say, Sadr’s Mahdi Army?
The sectarian violence in Iraq is a civil war and Maliki’s government in Baghdad is itself sectarian. To the extent that it supports the U.S. (and Bush’s surge), it does so only insofar as it can ally with American forces against the Sunnis, insofar as it can use the U.S. in its civil war against the Sunnis. As long as the U.S. remains an occupying force in Iraq governed by Maliki and his allies, it operates, wittingly nor not, as an instrument of sectarianism. Either it fights both sides, including the government on one of those sides, or it sides with one side (the Shiites) against the other (the Sunnis). Either way, it has been sucked into a civil war from which there is no easy escape.
All the more reason not to be there other than to protect refugees and to battle al Qaeda and other terrorist elements.
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3 Responses to “The weekend of violence in Iraq”
Since al-Qaeda is dominated by Sunnis, how do you propose to do this without being implicated in sectarianism?
I don’t think that your “stay there, but only to fight al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements” plan draws a sustainable line. Who exactly the “terrorist elements” are depends on your point of view. Inevitably, sectarian biases will influence those labels. And the intermixing of different types of groups means that the U.S. often does not know exactly which groups are implicated in a particular action or a particular raid.
I’m sympathetic to the notion that the U.S. needs to start limiting its range of missions in Iraq to avoid getting drawn deeper into a confused and complicated set of overlapping conflicts in Iraq. But I don’t think that it is possible to separate out al-Qaeda as a distinct entity in Iraq. It is like trying to find the eggs in the completed cake.
So, some of know that I’ve been pretty pessimistic about Iraq in the last week, and I think Michael does a great job of expressing my feelings of worry over the Shia dominated government.
However, while listening to a few news reports over the weekend I started to see a shimmer of hope. There seems to finally be a more large scale effort to both intermix the Iraqi army troops with both sunni and shia within the same unit, and to force them to interact with American troops more often. There is a chance, albeit a small one, for a new form of Iraqi leader to be forged in such an environment who can both see past the sectarian divide to the wisdom of the rule of law, and potentially have the power within the country to do something about it.
I’m not exactly hopeful yet, but I also don’t think we should pull out immediately either.
Jason, my impression is that there are religious based Sunnis that in the past were mostly foreign and then there are nationalistic Sunnis. The two groups were working together but had vastly different aims, and when we were negogiating with the “Sunnis” and said that the government process would bring in the “Sunni” we meant the nationalistic ones. Now since Samarra I’ve read several reports that even the nationalistic ones are attacking Shiite civilians, something they expressly kept from doing in the beginning years of the war.
Still, there are pretty “clear” lines of Al Qaeda types — groups that have been repeatedly attacked even by the Sunni tribes when they went too far in their destruction — and the political oriented tribal Sunnis that have focused mainly on attacking our troops to get us to leave and fear Shia dominance.