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Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

'Civil War in Iraq is Inevitable'

GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart? . . . The sneak attacks keep coming—against both Iraqi civilians and Coalition forces. Last week's deadliest incident was the crash of a U.S. medical helicopter near Fallujah, killing all nine aboard. Witnesses said the Black Hawk was brought down by ground fire. . . . Bush aides insist these are the death throes of the insurgency. And after more than 200 U.S. military deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom, one more tragic attack can hardly alter the Pentagon's plans. Coalition control over Iraq's destiny—and its fractious ethnic and religious factions—is scheduled to end in less than six months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) transfers power to an elected Iraqi leadership and disbands. . . . That thought scares Americans and Iraqis alike. Even if the transfer of authority allows GIs to step back from the front lines, deadly rivalries between Iraqis could make last week's bloodshed look like national unity. And an election-year U.S. troop drawdown is all but impossible. "If the Americans leave, there will definitely be a civil war," says Sheik Nadhim Khalil, 25, who has no great love for U.S. troops. In recent weeks they have ransacked his home and the mosque where he leads Friday services in Dholoiya, a farming town in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. U.S. officials think the best hope of preventing a bloodbath depends on creating an interim constitution that will somehow satisfy the demands of Iraq's disparate ethnic and religious groups. As if that alone didn't pose enough of a challenge, the deadline for producing the Transitional Administration Law is no later than Feb. 28. . . . a generation of Iraqi Kurds has grown up in a virtually independent state with its own laws, its own leaders and its own army. They don't want to trade their autonomy for life as an ethnic and religious minority in an overwhelmingly Arab nation of 25 million, including 15 million Shiites. On the contrary, the young Kurds are determined to reclaim an area that belonged to their people before the 1970s, when the Baghdad regime began a massive program of forced removals in and around the city of Kirkuk. The onetime Kurdish regional capital sits atop roughly 6 percent of the world's known oil reserves. . . . If the Kurds do secede, with or without Kirkuk, Bremer can scarcely hope to persuade other Iraqis to make sacrifices for the sake of national unity. . . . Khalil, who made a quick trip from Dholoiya to Baghdad a few days after the raid, says he has joined the shura. If his attitude is any sign of what the group's members think, the cause of national unity is in deep trouble. Khalil makes no secret of his contempt for Iraq's Shiite majority. In his Friday sermons he has called for the creation of Sunni militias to challenge the Shiites' 10,000 or so Iranian-trained paramilitary fighters and the Kurds' roughly 70,000 battle-hardened peshmerga fighters. "We are willing to sacrifice our sons and fathers to stop the rule of black turbans," he says, using a Sunni term of disparagement for Shiites. "Being ruled by Shiites would be the same as being ruled by Iran. This is unacceptable." Attendance at his mosque has doubled in recent months. . . . Iraq's neighbors are saying prayers of their own as they watch what's happening next door. They have all had their share of ethnic problems with Kurds and other minorities, but their concern goes deeper than that. When the WMD searches came up empty, Bush aides began claiming that the invasion was actually a way of planting the seeds of democracy in Arab lands. Now the fear is that Iraq's collapse could destabilize the entire region.

posted by Lorenzo 9:55 AM