Jacob,
The People there don't like us, and they don't trust us. They hate us, actually. The civilian population on the battleground, is of a different tribe from us, they are profoundly foreign to us, and they don't want us running their country. We have got on the wrong side of both Iraqi nationalism, and Islam, and those are the two most powerful ideologies in that part of the world.
Actually, I think it is even more complicated than that. It isn't simply that they don't like us. They also don't particularly like each other. I am printing two articles below. The first reports on two Shia factions beginning a cycle of violence with each other in the south. The second reports on the north, where Turkmen in Iraq are complaining about Kurdification: "We survived Arabization, and now it's time to see if we're going to survive Kurdification." We have unleashed tensions in that artificially constructed "country" that we never anticipated, though certainly before the war any number of people warned about it, including not just Arab leaders, but even Joe Biden, who in one of his Senate speeches last fall told the admin to go very very slowly and think very very long and hard before beginning a war.
Are we or they better off without Saddam? In some obvious ways of course yes, but, frankly, the jury is still out on the long term picture, IMHO. Iraq may well set an "example" for the region, but it may not be a pretty one. The chickens that the British commission back in the 1920s warned would come home to roost if the Ottoman Empire was dismembered continue to lay rancid eggs.
Sam
Shiites march after Iraq bomb
NAJAF, Iraq --An angry crowd gathered in the streets of the holy city of Najaf as funerals were held for three bodyguards killed in a bomb attack outside the home of one of Iraq's top clerics.
At least 2,000 Shiite Muslims followed behind the wooden coffins, with many of them carrying posters of Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim who was slightly wounded in the neck in Sunday's bombing.
Some blamed supporters of rival Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr for the attack at a Shiite spiritual center about 161 kilometers (100 miles) south of Baghdad. (Full story)
Sadr has criticized the U.S. occupation of Iraq and refused to join the coalition-backed Governing Council.
"This was Moqtada al Sadr. His people did it,'' 60-year-old Muslim Radii, told Reuters. "Now there will be revenge. The only way to stop this is for the people of Najaf to stop it. We will have to form our own militia.''
Sadr's group has denied responsibility for the bombing.
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the country's main Shiite groups, said it was the target of the attack, Reuters reported.
Hakim is the uncle of SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim.
The blast killed two guards outside the building and a worker inside the office and 10 people -- mostly pedestrians -- were wounded, one seriously, a spokesman for the ayatollah told CNN.
Hakim, who has had contact with U.S. officials since before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, was walking through a hallway when the blast went off and received minor injuries from glass shards, his spokesman said.
The spokesman said an explosive device had detonated inside a gas canister that had been left outside an office where the ayatollah's son was working.
The home is about half a mile south of the Imam Ali Mosque, a site sacred to Shiites around the world. Ali was the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and the first leader of the Shiite community.
The spokesman also said that the ayatollah and his followers hold the U.S. military responsible for maintaining security in Najaf and therefore hold the Americans indirectly responsible for the attack.
Iraqi police said Hakim apparently received a death threat last week, but did not report it to police.
The spokesman confirmed the death threat, and said the ayatollah and other leading Iraqi religious figures in Najaf had received threats telling them that they must leave Najaf or be killed.
Meanwhile in Beirut, the Shiite Muslim guerrilla group Hizbollah -- which is on a U.S. list of "terrorist'' groups -- condemned the bomb attack as a "very serious development," Reuters reported.
"This incident must be met with harsh condemnation from all religious scholars and the community. And a strong message must be sent to these criminals and whoever is behind them,'' Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said in a statement.
Find this article at:
edition.cnn.com
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In North Iraq, Saddam's Victims Turn on Each Other
Mon August 25, 2003 09:06 AM ET
By Joseph Logan
TUZ KHURMATU, Iraq (Reuters) - It should be impossible to get lost in a town with so few streets, but in the dusty little hamlet of Tuz Khurmatu hopes of peaceful coexistence between Iraq's minorities have gone badly astray.
Fighting among Kurds and Turkmen -- Turkish speakers who are a vestige of Ottoman rule -- over the sacking of a shrine in Tuz Khurmatu killed at least nine people in the town last week and unrest spread to the key oil city of Kirkuk.
The violence shows there is no common bond in having suffered under Saddam Hussein. Kurds and Turkmen recall years of persecution under Saddam, who was set on Arabising the region, site of Iraq's richest oil reserves. But in Tuz Khurmatu the two groups have the knives out for one another.
"I was imprisoned in 1994 for criticizing Saddam Hussein, and to me this regime frankly is worse, more impure," says Midhar Qasim, a Turkmen and the father of one of those killed in clashes last Friday in the town, governed by a Kurd.
"What the Palestinians are getting from the Zionists is what we're getting here. We survived Arabization, and now it's time to see if we're going to survive Kurdification."
The Kurds endured a campaign of chemical weapons attacks and destruction of their villages that killed as many as 100,000 people during the mid-1980s at the hands of a Baghdad government intent on crushing their separatist ambitions.
Since Saddam's fall, they have extended their influence from the northern zone they wrested from Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War to Kirkuk and its surroundings, playing a leading role in local governments working with the U.S. military.
TURF WAR
Turkmen accuse returning Kurds of theft and intimidation. The Kurds say they are willing to live alongside Arabs and Turkmen -- but insist the region belongs to them.
"We look at this as a city of Kurdistan...one in which non- Kurds also live," says Ruzgar Ali, the Kirkuk head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main Kurdish political factions, and which Turkmen have singled out for accusations of thuggery.
"The greatest oppression, the greatest burden, was on the Kurds under Saddam Hussein, not that it wasn't bad also for Turkmen, and Arab Shi'ites," Ali said.
He said the problems were the work of extremists manipulated by outsiders resentful of the Kurds' relationship with U.S. forces. Tuz Khurmatu's Kurdish mayor said the same, blaming "elements that want to divide Kurds and Turkmen."
The reference is left broad enough to include Turkey, which fears Kurdish control in oil-rich Kirkuk and elsewhere could rekindle separatism among its own 12 million Kurds.
Many Turkmen, however, blame the Kurds.
"There are no unseen hands, and this is not the first time the PUK attacked us since Saddam fell. They don't recognize any minorities," said one man at a funeral in Tuz Khurmatu for Turkmen killed in last week's violence.
"There is such hate."
There is little sign of compromise either in Kirkuk, where Turkmen join Kurds in scrawling graffiti that stake claims to ethnic turf.
"Kirkuk is Turkmen, and will stay that way till the end," reads one spray-painted slogan. "Kirkuk is the capital of the Turkmen," says another.
Only a few residents say ethnic badges are unimportant.
"It doesn't matter, if you're really from Kirkuk," says Idris, who like many residents of the city moves through the languages of the Kirkuk -- Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish -- in the course of a conversation. "Everyone here knows everyone else too well to believe the lies." |
