If you watch Oliver North, or Fox News in general, it seems like things are getting better in Iraq. If you read a wide variety of items from the Asian and European press, you get the sense that things are going worse. This is one of the problems we have in America now that many people only watch the "news" that supports their own political leanings. Not only that, but some will not even consider that another version of reality (that might even be more accurate) exists. So it's really hard to even discuss current events--very amorophous!
Here are a couple of articles that I would put forth suggesting things are not really getting better in Iraq. And I saw a cable news poll indicating a majority of Americans think we should pull out of Iraq in the case of a civil war:
Rebels Seem Intent on Civil War in Iraq
By PAUL GARWOOD
The Associated Press
Monday, May 16, 2005; 5:27 PM
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Civilians shopping at street markets, worshipping at mosques and mourning at funerals have become the prime target of insurgents in a two-week spree of carnage that many people think is linked to efforts by foreign extremists to plunge Iraq into civil war.
At least 489 people, most of them civilians, have been killed by bombings and other insurgent attacks since Iraq's new government was announced by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on April 28.
Now, with the bodies of 50 men found shot to death by unknown assailants and dumped across the country over two days, fears are rising that foreigners like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be making headway in their campaign to turn Iraq's fractious communities against each other.
There are worries the unexplained killings in Baghdad and other cities could be a result of angry Shiite and Sunni Muslims retaliating against each other's communities in frustration over two years of unrelenting insurgent attacks.
Religious leaders also have been singled out. Shiite cleric Qassim al-Gharawi died in a drive-by shooting in western Baghdad last week. Quraish Abdul Jabbar, a Sunni cleric, was reported shot dead and his body dumped behind a mosque in northeastern Baghdad on Monday.
"We are approaching a situation that is unstable, of a war of all against all, complete chaos, where the government is ineffective, the security is ineffective, and anybody can be killed at any time by anybody," said Kenneth Katzman, an expert on the Persian Gulf region with the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
The Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaida in Iraq, made his intentions clear in a letter obtained and released last year by the U.S. government saying that causing sectarian fighting between Shiite and Sunni was the best way to undermine American policy in Iraq.
Most of the insurgent attacks aimed at civilians have been in neighborhoods whose residents are predominantly from Iraq's Shiite Arab majority or their Kurdish allies. Many insurgents are thought to be from the formally dominant Sunni Arab minority, but many Iraqis blame foreign extremists for the assaults on civilians.
"This shows that the terrorists are in their last period. They weren't able to violate the security zone and therefore they started targeting schools, markets in order to kill civilians," the new defense minister, Saadoun al-Duleimi, said at a news conference Monday.
Al-Duleimi, a Sunni Arab, said insurgents killed 230 civilians last week alone, while only 13 Iraqi soldiers and policemen were slain.
The government's efforts to quell insurgent violence and keep Iraq's religious and ethnic communities from splitting could be complicated by the close relationship between the Interior Ministry, headed by Shiite leader Bayan Jabr, and the Badr Brigades, the militia of Iraq's leading Shiite group, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Concern was raised when the militia, once regarded as terrorist by U.S. officials, cooperated with security forces to capture four Palestinians and an Iraqi wanted for a bombing Thursday that killed at least 17 people at market in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.
Al-Duleimi, the defense minister, has said he won't merge militias such as the Badr Brigades and the Kurdish Peshmerga into Iraq's army. The United States has called for the militias to be disbanded.
Despite the violence and communal frictions, Katzman, the analyst at the Congressional Research Service, doesn't yet see Iraq tumbling into a sectarian war.
"Some would define this as some kind of civil war, but we don't yet have entire distinct camps across the country opposing each other," he said.
Iraq's influential Shiite leaders, particularly Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are also playing a key role in tamping down resentments that could erupt into civil war.
Laith Kuba, spokesman for al-Sistani, said Shiite retaliation against Sunnis over terrorist attacks could jeopardize the Shiites' new role as the strongest political group.
"There is an awareness among Shiites now that we have the larger presence in the country, run the state and can benefit most" from peaceful relations, Kuba said.
Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people, were oppressed under Saddam Hussein, then emerged from the Jan. 30 elections with the biggest bloc in the National Assembly. They have allied with Kurds, who also were oppressed by Saddam, but have included Sunnis in the government in an effort to ease Sunni discontent over losing power.
One factor working against the effort by foreign extremists to foment civil war is the widespread belief among Iraqis that homegrown anti-U.S. insurgents, either fervent nationalists opposed to foreign occupation or former Saddam loyalists angered by their fall from power, would not turn their weapons on fellow Iraqis.
So many Iraqis aim their anger over the attacks at foreign extremists and allied Iraqis who follow the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam.
"Civilians are always going to the easiest targets, and the Islamic extremists coming into the country are using them to try torpedo Iraq's political process," said Ismael Zayer, editor in chief of the Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah al-Gadeed.
"Civil war is the only scenario they have," Zayer said of the foreign terrorists. "These people have nothing else."
washingtonpost.com
Violence Blamed on Zarqawi Allies
Attacks Surged After Insurgents Met in Syria, U.S. Officer Says
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 19, 2005; A24
BAGHDAD, May 18 -- A senior U.S. military official told reporters Wednesday that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a meeting in Syria last month of associates of the Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.
The rash of bombings and assassinations across the country this month has killed more than 450 people and shattered a period of relative calm after Iraq's Jan. 30 parliamentary elections.
Zarqawi "wasn't happy with how the insurgency was going. The government was getting stronger and coalition forces not being defeated," the U.S. official said, according to news service accounts of the briefing, which was given on the condition that he not be named.
The disclosures followed comments made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who during a visit to Iraq on Sunday expressed concern about the "gathering of terrorist networks" in Syria. Last weekend, U.S. Marines wrapped up an offensive in northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border, aimed at uprooting sanctuaries for foreign fighters who had crossed into the country.
Zarqawi leads the group al Qaeda in Iraq, which has asserted responsibility for many of the insurgency's deadliest attacks. The U.S. military has put a $25 million bounty on his head. Reports that he had been wounded or killed during the recent Marine offensive have been denied in Internet postings.
The U.S. official who briefed reporters Wednesday said that it was unclear whether Zarqawi attended the meeting in Syria but that his lieutenants were encouraged to step up attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces, particularly with car bombings. Insurgents have carried out 21 car bombings in Baghdad this month, compared with 25 in all of 2004, the official said.
An audio recording posted on the Internet on Wednesday and attributed to Zarqawi justified the deaths of Muslims in attacks against U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies, saying holy war was too important to be hindered, the Associated Press reported. The authenticity of the tape, posted on a forum where al Qaeda in Iraq statements are often found, could not be independently verified, the AP reported.
The man purported to be Zarqawi, who like the bulk of Iraqi insurgents is a Sunni Muslim, denounced Iraq's Shiite Muslims as collaborators with the Americans and said leaders of the country's Shiite-led government were traitors to Islam. The recording accused Shiite militias of assassinating Sunni leaders, kidnapping Sunni women and seizing mosques since the U.S.-led invasion two years ago.
In a further sign of tensions between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, religious leaders traded charges Wednesday over who was responsible for a recent wave of execution-style killings. Two Sunni clerics were found dead in Baghdad on Tuesday, and a Shiite cleric was shot to death. The bodies of more than 60 Iraqis who were apparently executed have been discovered across the country in recent days, many with their hands bound and bullets in their skulls.
"We know who is killing the imams and preachers of the mosques. We know who is killing people going to prayers. The ones responsible for these killings are the Badr Brigades," Harith Dhari, the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni religious organization, said in a televised address.
The Badr organization is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major Shiite political party that is part of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's ruling coalition. While the Badr group has recast itself as a political organization in recent years, it is still widely believed to operate as a militia.
"They've killed Sunnis and Shiites. They've killed anyone who stood in their way. The one responsible for the tension in the country is Badr," Dhari said.
Responding to the accusation, Hadi Amiri, secretary general of the Badr group and a member of Iraq's National Assembly, placed the blame for recent killings on elements of the Iraqi government led by former president Saddam Hussein.
"We condemn all of the criminal operations against the Iraqis," Amiri said. "These are terrorist acts committed by the remnants of the former regime and their allies of extremists. They aim to provoke strife among the Iraqis."
The Jafari government says the executions are meant to foment sectarian violence and are not evidence of existing sectarian tensions. Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Jafari, said the accusation by Dhari could lead to more violence.
"The sheik is a man of influence, and one would have thought he would be far more careful with his words," Kubba said.
In Washington, the head of U.S. Central Command said the insurgency appeared to be focused on intimidating Iraqis -- mainly in areas populated by Sunnis -- to dissuade them from becoming active in the new government.
Army Gen. John P. Abizaid said the insurgents' reliance on Iraqis to kill their countrymen mirrors the "Al Capone-style government" that ruled Iraq for three decades under Hussein.
"It's my impression that the majority of the insurgents that are fighting continue to be Iraqis," he said, adding that foreign extremists are playing a role in the violence but that their role should not be overestimated. "People are killing their own people for no good reason that I can see."
Abizaid said that "the first and most important issue in Iraq is the political process remaining viable. If it doesn't remain viable, it will spark more violence. What will make the biggest difference in Iraq is the political process."
In recent days, some Sunni leaders have accused the Jafari government and particularly the Interior Ministry, which oversees the country's police force, of permitting or even conducting attacks on clerics, charges the government has denied.
Interior Ministry officials have themselves been frequent targets of assassinations. That pattern continued Tuesday morning when Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Khammas, head of criminal intelligence at the ministry, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he left his house for work.
Later in the day, in a town southeast of Baghdad, Iraqi police discovered the bullet-riddled bodies of seven Turkmens who worked as security guards for U.S. and Iraqi convoys, according to police Capt. Nadhum Dulaimi. Al Qaeda in Iraq later issued a statement asserting responsibility for the killings.
washingtonpost.com |
