Monday, July 10, 2006

Shia massacre revives fears of civil war

There is no way that even President Bush's most stalwart defenders of the Iraq war could put a positive gloss on what happened yesterday.

Shia militants went on the rampage across a Baghdad suburb, setting up roadblocks, demanding to see the identification cards of all who passed, and slaughtering anyone who possessed a Sunni name. More than forty people died in the carnage.

What I find simply stunning about this, is that the occupation army have so little control on the ground that such a massacre could ever take place. The argument that we cannot leave because it would inevitably result in chaos is seriously undermined when such chaos exists whilst we remain, supposedly, in charge.

What are we doing there? We are certainly not running the country and blatantly we are not insuring security, so what the bloody hell are we doing there?

The slaughter lasted several hours, according to Alaa Makki, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic party, one of the main Sunni parties, who blamed the Mahdi army, the Shia militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr. "There is a lot of evidence it was done by the Mahdi army," he told the Guardian by phone from Baghdad.
Where were out forces during those "several hours"? Why didn't we intervene to stop this madness?

The militia were also said to have gone into houses and detained people. In one case a family was murdered and the house was then set on fire. A police lieutenant, Maitham Abdul-Razzaq, said 37 bodies were taken to hospitals and police were searching for more victims reportedly dumped in the streets. Several houses were burning, other police sources said.

Wissam Mohammad Hussein al-Ani, a 27-year-old Sunni calligrapher, told Associated Press reporters that three gunmen had stopped him as he was walking to a bus and asked him to show identification. They let him go after he produced a fake ID with a Shia name but seized two young men standing nearby.

The Shia owner of a supermarket said he had seen heavily armed men pull four people out of a car, blindfold them and forcethem to stand aside while they grabbed five others out of a minivan. "After 10 minutes, the gunmen took the nine people to a place a few metres away from the market and opened fire on them," Saad Jawad Kadhim al-Azzawi said.

The killings in Jihad followed tit-for-tat attacks on Sunni and Shia places of worship on Friday and Saturday. Mr Makki said these attacks were made by unknown "third parties who want to provoke violence and get Sunnis to leave the area".

The deputy prime minister, Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, a Sunni, called the attack "a real and ugly massacre" and blamed Iraqi security forces. "There are officers who, instead of being in charge, should be referred to judicial authorities," al-Zubaie told al-Jazeera TV. "Jihad is witnessing a catastrophic crime."

The first and foremost role of any occupation army is to restore and maintain order. We have manifestly failed in that task.

Which brings me to George Bush and the Republican mantra that we "should stay the course". What course? They appear not to have one as the only course Iraq is on is the course to civil war.

Baghdad now resembles Beirut during the Lebanese civil war where sectarian violence and slaughter of the civilian population became commonplace; and where the Phalange, exactly as their Shia counterparts did yesterday, set up roadblocks and killed anyone carrying the wrong sort of identification card, i.e. Palestinian or Christian.

The situation on the ground is now undeniably in chaos.

It is becoming ever harder to ignore the reality that is staring us in the face. Iraq is lost.

The truth is that the forces Rumsfeld employed were always too small to carry out the task that was asked of them.

The choice therefore is simple. Either increase the troop levels to 750,000 or admit defeat and withdraw.

No-one seriously expects Bush to adopt the first option, therefore we are left "staying the course", which is really just a euphemism for stubbornly refusing to admit defeat.

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