Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday -- the day the Shiites' gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed -- photographing, numbering and tagging the bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids.
The Mahdi army seems to have been involved in a number of violent attacks on Sunnis. On today's Diane Rehm show, NPR's Foreign Correspondent in Baghdad speculated that al-Sadr is playing both sides of the fence, on one hand calling for calm while at the same time he gives the Mahdi army free reign to carry out attacks (with the complicity of loyal Iraqi security forces.) She also reported that the more hard-line clerics like al-Sadr are putting great pressure on the likes of Ayatolloah Ali Sistani to take action against the Sunnis, as the anger over the bombing was so great that many of even Sistani's most loyal followers pressed for more action against the Sunnis in revenge and seemed frustrated with the Ayatollah's calls for calm and peace. And although militias seem not to be roaming the streets in such numbers as last week, the violence still continues, as does efforts by the Iraqi government to curb it:
Iraqi tanks deployed in Baghdad to pacify the city after an eruption of sectarian violence, but the bombing of a Sunni mosque and a mortar attack shattered the relative calm. Four people were killed and 15 wounded in the bomb attack outside a Sunni mosque in eastern Baghdad as the faithful were leaving evening prayers, security officials said. The attack was the latest strike against Iraq's ousted Sunni elite since Shiite mobs unleashed a wave of vengeance against the embittered minority after a revered Shiite shrine was blown up north of Baghdad last Wednesday.
Whether or not the pace of attacks slows, it's clear the bombing and the retaliation that followed has fractured Iraq even further:
A pattern of politics drawn along sectarian or ethnic lines has strengthened in the wake of Saddam Hussein's rule. Leading moderate voices like Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani have taken harder lines, and the growing authority of unelected clerics in determining Iraq's future is presenting new hurdles to the unity government most experts believe is needed to bring stability.
Though Ambassador Khalilzad and other American officials say the crisis has been averted for now, they have few resources to impose the kind of national unity government many believe is necessary for peace. The US is also calling for the disarming of sectarian militias - as it has done without success for much of the past two years. But a unity government and an end to militias are precisely what seems least likely in the wake of recent events.
"It may well be that things will die down now,'' says Joost Hilterman, who runs the International Crisis Group's (ICG) Middle East Project in Amman, Jordan. "But the structural dynamic still points toward civil war, and the institutions that could restrain it have become severely weakened." Mr. Hiltermann's organization released a report on civil war in Iraq on Sunday, saying it could be averted if a national unity government is formed and militias disarmed. But Hiltermann says that while that may be the best way forward, he's skeptical that will happen."I don't see a solution, frankly. But if there is to be a solution it will have to come from the US expending a lot of political capital to convince them that the only way to keep Iraq united, which is a shared interest, is to form a government of national unity,'' he says.
The ICG also says it would be best to plan for the worst:
A measure of how seriously the threat of all-out civil war is being taken can be found in the recommendations of Monday's ICG report."The international community, including neighboring states, should start planning for the contingency that Iraq will fall apart, so as to contain the inevitable fallout on regional stability and security."
As one can imagine, furious diplomacy is taking place in an effort to avoid such an outcome. However, we here at home can only sit back and wait to see if Iraq falls apart.
1 comment:
You know, the outbreak of violence resulting from this one bombing is vastly diproportionate to the importance of the target. Obviously this has only exposed the cracks in the Iraqi "democracy" that already existed. Once again, the Bush administration painted an overly optimistic picture in order to deflect criticism.
The question of whether anything can be saved is not as important as whether there is anything to save and whether it is worth saving at this point. As stated in a previous article, we wouldn't want to save them from civil war only to have a new Lebanon as the end result. If we can keep Iraq from collapsing now, it must be because the Iraqi democracy is a viable solution. If we can't keep it from collapsing, then we need to acknowledge that and start working out the aftermath. What are our strategic options? 3 separate states? Would a new Iraqi Shiite state ally itself with Iran or even become part of it? What about the Kurds and Sunnnis?
Failure may not be inevitable, but it's best to plan for it when you can see it as a result.
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