"They have tentacles that reach all through the new government and the new military," Lt. Gen. Walter Buchanan, who commands U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf, admitted recently.
The new government is not only powerless to stop the attacks by insurgents, it is dominated by the same clique of warlords and exiles who lobbied the Pentagon to go to war in the first place, many of whom have close ties to the warring camps that control vast parts of the country.
"In the Arab world, Iraq is seen as a zone of chaos in a pre-civil-war situation, held together only by the U.S. occupation," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush’s father.
A brief survey of the three major forces in Iraq — Shiites in the south, Sunnis in the center and Kurds in the north — makes clear the sharp divisions that threaten to blow the country apart:
The Shiites: The Bush administration’s plan for reconstruction envisioned the Shiites — the majority population long oppressed by Saddam Hussein — as the chief power in a democratic Iraq.
The United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite party backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, won a majority in the new national assembly.
But a militant bloc of fundamentalist Shiites has been using its newfound strength — and its street thugs — to forcibly impose Islamic law throughout the southern half of Iraq.
Militias loyal to rival Shiite factions are blowing up liquor stores and movie theaters, forcing women to wear ultraconservative Islamic dress and assassinating secular officials and other opponents.
...The Mahdi, which battled U.S. forces during two major uprisings last year, is fiercely loyal to the charismatic and fanatical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the scion of a leading fundamentalist Shiite family.
Al-Sadr’s militia, hammered in last year’s clashes, is quickly rebuilding with new recruits armed with machine guns, rocket launchers and rocket-propelled grenades.
It now controls a big chunk of Basra, Iraq’s only port and second-largest city, along with Kut, Amarah, Nasariyah and the huge eastern district of Baghdad known as Sadr City.
In April, al-Sadr organized a rally of 300,000 people to demand that U.S. troops leave Iraq.
The Mahdi Army’s main rival for power among the Shiites is the Badr Brigade, which has an estimated 20,000 men under arms.
Badr is run by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and trained by his Revolutionary Guards.
SCIRI’s leaders still have close ties to Iran, even though many of its officials have been elected to the new Iraqi parliament.
The hard-line group is powerful in Iraq’s two holy cities, Najaf and Karbala, and controls another chunk of Basra.
Other Shiite forces include the Dawa Islamic Party, whose chieftain, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is Iraq’s new prime minister. Dawa was an underground terrorist organization in Iraq from the 1960s through the 1980s, and militants linked to the group attacked the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983.
While the State Department says it has no evidence to connect al-Jaafari himself to any terrorist acts, those who study the group suspect that Dawa also gets support from Iran.
"They’ve been spreading money to everyone," says Juan Cole, an expert on Shiism at the University of Michigan.
The Sunnis: In central Iraq, millions of formerly dominant Sunnis opted out of the elections for the new government, which they see as being almost entirely in the hands of southern Shiites and northern Kurds.
There are now several dozen Sunni organizations fighting the U.S. occupation, broadly divided into two camps: mainstream, secular Arab nationalists who served as military officers and Baath Party leaders under Saddam, and Islamist fundamentalists, including extremists associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Most of the attacks on American forces — the roadside IEDs, mortar strikes and full-scale assaults — have been conducted by the mainstream resistance, who are intent on driving out the U.S.
Kira Wolf, 19, from Arlington, Va., places flowers at the grave of her boyfriend Lance Cpl. Colin J. Wolfe, at Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 3, 2006.
Kira says she visits her loved one's grave every other day.
Lance Cpl. Colin Wolfe, 19, of Manassas, Va., died Aug. 30, 2006 while conducting combat operations in Iraq's Al Anbar province.
Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll, February 24, 2007.
But at the same time, they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed. Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta | |
They have brought down helicopters, destroyed at least eighty of the Abrams tanks that are the mainstay of the U.S. occupation, and mounted large-scale actions involving scores of fighters, such as the April attacks on the Abu Ghraib prison and at Al Qaim near the Syrian border.
In one recent incident, car bombs exploded simultaneously in front of and behind a U.S. convoy, which then came under intense fire from automatic weapons wielded by snipers inside abandoned buildings along the route.
To make matters worse, the Kurds have set their sights on Kirkuk, a multi-ethnic city that sits atop Iraq’s vast northern oil fields.
Even though the city lies outside of Kurdistan, Talabani calls it "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan," and Barzani says, "We are ready to fight and to sacrifice our souls to preserve its identity."
The Kurds are already engaging in some brutal expulsions of Arabs from the city.
"They’re doing their own ethnic cleansing, and it’s dirty stuff," says Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraq.
A full-scale Kurdish takeover, however, would be resisted by Arabs and Turks in Kirkuk.
...Even Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that was virtually obliterated in a U.S. blitz last fall, is quietly re-emerging as a center of resistance.
Fallujah’s mayor, in the circumspect language of one U.S. official, is "doing some things not positive in nature."
Meanwhile, the city of Mosul has become the newest hotbed of the insurgency.
Last fall, during an attack by insurgents there, thousands of Iraqi police melted away at the first sign of violence.
"I went from 2,000 police to 50," a U.S. commander on the scene told reporters.
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Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports... Our accounting is not complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close to achieving that
Bush's high-risk civil war scam
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