Iraq Violence Continues
The situation in Iraq is deteriorating rapidly. News reports indicate hundreds have died in fighting around the country in recent days, and that the Iraq government is in imminent danger of losing control of several cities. Even the Green Zone isn’t safe.
After months of absence from the front pages of American print journalism and lead stories on broadcast news, the Iraq quagmire has forced itself back into the mainstream consciousness. Fighting is raging, it looks like Shiite militias have taken off the gloves, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is (to use a sports metaphor) giving bulletin board material to the opposition. Oh, and American military personnel continue to die.
A report from NPR this morning provides a clue about just how bad things are getting in Basra. A humanitarian crisis is developing, and hundreds have died and been injured in fighting over the past few days. Iraqi army and police forces are apparently taking off their uniforms and switching sides to join the militia fighters. It’s also worth noting that Basra hosts the main Iraq oil export terminal - no word yet on the security of that facility, but pipelines to the facility have been blown up.
Rockets and mortars are still being fired at the Green Zone Bar and Grille in Baghdad; the Sadr City area of Baghdad is the scene of large street protests, and a great deal of fighting is apparently spreading in Baghdad. There is also much unrest and fighting in the southern region of Iraq, where the main supply routes for the U.S. occupation are traveled to and from Kuwait.
It’s only going to get worse:
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is promising to pursue his fight against Shiite militias in Basra to “the end.”
Al-Maliki made his pledge to Basra area tribal leaders Thursday as military operations against the militias continued for a fourth day despite stiff resistance.
Al-Maliki told the leaders “we have made up our minds” to enter the fight “and we will continue until the end. No retreat.” …
Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar have compiled a “must read” analysis at AlterNet on the current violence in Iraq. While I don’t expect that any of the presidential candidates will immediately respond, since so much conflicting information flowing in, it bears repeating that the situation in Iraq looks like it’s going to start dominating the political discourse once again.
Of course, the Bush administration is trying to spritz eau de cologne on their pet pig:
The Pentagon portrayed the new wave of sectarian violence sweeping Iraq Wednesday as offering a positive sign of the Iraqi Army building on the success of the U.S. troop surge.
“Part of the point of the surge was to give them the time, the training, to increase their capability, and they are now displaying it,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said of the Iraqi Army’s move against militias in Basra…
Yeah. By shedding their uniforms and joining the militia fighters. Those “dead-enders” just won’t give up.
The Bush administration has tried so hard to sweep Iraq under the rug for the past few months, and even more so as the violence has escalated dramatically in recent weeks. The lid is off now, though, and maybe the situation will finally receive the stateside political discussion that it deserves.
the piece pasted puts to bed the myth that the surge is working.
the shiite militia groups — described in the text pasted below, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, can make or break the bush policy in iraq. and right now it seems to be almost ready to pull all stops.
as evidence, last night on jim lehrer i saw this http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/index.html
i also saw on keith olbermann an interview of fred kaplan — kaplan has a provocative piece “defining victory in iraq” — http://www.slate.com/id/2187386/
piece pasted below from asiatimes http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JC28Ak03.html
Muqtada cuts free
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The escalation of fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and their Shi’ite rivals, which could mark the end of Muqtada al-Sadr’s self-imposed ceasefire, also exposes General David Petraeus’ strategy for controlling Muqtada’s forces as a failure.
Petraeus reacted immediately to Sunday’s rocket attacks on the Green Zone by blaming them on Iran. He told the BBC the rockets were “Iranian provided, Iranian-made rockets”, and that they were launched by groups that were funded and trained by the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Petraeus said this was “in complete violation of promises made by President [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad and other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts”.
Petraeus statement was clearly intended to divert attention from a development that threatens one of the two main pillars of the administration’s claim of progress in Iraq - the willingness of Muqtada to restrain the Mahdi Army, even in the face of systematic raids on its leadership by the US military and its Iraqi allies.
The rocket attacks appear to have been one of several actions by the Mahdi Army to warn the United States and the Iraqi government to halt their systematic raids aimed at driving the Sadrists out of key Shi’ite centers in the south. They were followed almost immediately by Mahdi Army clashes with rival Shi’ite militiamen in Basra, Sadr City and Kut and a call for a nationwide general strike to demand the release of Sadrist detainees.
Even more pointed was a strong warning from Muqtada aide Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammedawi to the United States as well as to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), whose Badr Organization militiamen, in the uniforms of Iraqi security forces, have targeted the Madhi Army throughout the south. “They don’t seem to realize that the Sadrist trend is like a volcano,” he told worshippers Friday in Kufa. “If it explodes, it will crush their rotten heads.”
The signs that the Madhi Army will no longer remain passive mark a major defeat for the US military command’s strategy aimed at weakening the Mahdi Army.
When he took command in Iraq in early 2007, Petraeus recognized that the US occupation forces could not afford to wage a full-fledged campaign against the Mahdi Army as a whole. Instead it adopted a strategy of dividing the Sadrist movement.
Petraeus and the ground commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, hoped that there were leaders in the Sadrist movement who would be willing to give up further military resistance and accept the US occupation and the existing government.
For months, the command tried to generate a “dialogue” with “moderates” in the Sadrist camp. It issued a series of statements hailing Muqtada’s willingness to change the purpose of his movement. Most recently, on January 17, Odierno said, “I believe he is trying to move forward with more of a religious organization and get away from a militia type-supported organization.” But he admitted, “That could change.”
Meanwhile, Petraeus targeted selected elements of the Mahdi Army in raids in Sadr City and the Shi’ite south, portraying its targets as “criminals” and “rogue elements” which had broken away from Muqtada and were armed, trained and financed by Iran. Odierno suggested in his January 17 press briefing that such renegade groups were causing “the majority of the violence”.
But the “moderate” Sadrists who would be willing to make a deal with the US never materialized. Last July, a US commander in Baghdad claimed that Sadrist representatives had initiated “indirect” talks with the US military. But in January, Odierno would say only that they had been meeting with “local leaders” in Sadr City, not with representatives of the Sadrist movement.
The Mahdi Army’s blunt warnings of military countermeasures followed months of raids against Muqtada’s political-military organization by both US forces and the Badr Organization. According to a senior Sadrist parliamentarian, between 2,000 and 2,500 Mahdi Army militiamen had been detained since Muqtada declared a ceasefire last August.
The raids have been aimed at weakening the Madhi Army’s political hold on Shi’ite cities in anticipation of eventual provincial elections.
During 2007 there were signs of strong support for Muqtada in Najaf, Basra and Karbala, as Sudarsan Raghavan reported in the Washington Post last December. In Najaf, portraits of Muqtada and his father, grand ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s security forces in 1999, had “mushroomed defiantly in the streets”.
Muqtada’s image had also been “pervasive” in Karbala, according to Raghavan, until security forces loyal to the ISCI arrested more than 400 of Muqtada’s followers in an obvious effort to destroy its organization in the city.
For months Muqtada had refrained from authorizing a full-fledged response to such attacks on his forces. But on Tuesday an officer at Muqtada’s headquarters in Najaf said the Mahdi Army should be prepared to “strike the occupiers” as well as the Badr Organization.
Revealing the contradictions built into the US position in Iraq, even as it was blaming Iran for the alleged renegade units of the Mahdi Army, the US was using the Badr Organization, the military arm of the ISCI, to carry out raids against the Mahdi Army. The Badr Organization and the ISCI had always been and remained the most pro-Iranian political-military forces in Iraq, having been established, trained and funded by the IRGC from Shi’ite exiles in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
It was the ISCI leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim who had invited two IRGC officers to be his guests in December 2006, apparently to discuss military assistance to the Badr Organization. The Iranian officials were seized in the home of Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of the Badr Organization and detained by the US military. The George W Bush administration continued throughout 2007 to cite those Iranian visitors as evidence of the IRGC’s illicit intervention in Iraq.
But the Badr Organization had become the indispensable element of the Iraqi government’s security forces, who could be counted on to oppose the Mahdi Army in the south. And in a further ironic twist, it was the leaders of the ISCI and of the Nuri al-Maliki government, which depended on Iranian support, who insisted last summer and autumn that the US should credit Iran with having prevailed on Muqtada to agree to a ceasefire. The close collaboration of the US command with these pro-Iranian groups against Muqtada appears to be the main reason for the State Department’s endorsement of that argument last December.
The Petraeus assertion that the rocket attacks on the Green Zone were Iranian-inspired strongly implied that Iran is still providing arms to Shi’ite militias. However, Odierno told a press briefing in mid-January, “We are not sure if they’re still importing [sic] weapons into Iraq.”
That admission came only after many months in which US officers in the border provinces were unable to find any evidence of arms coming across the border from Iran.
Those officers also found no trace of the alleged presence of the IRGC personnel in Iraq. Last November, the French weekly news magazine Le Point quoted Major Scott A Pettigrew, the military intelligence chief in Diyala province on the Iranian border, as saying, “I have never seen any activity or presence of the Quds Force. I see nothing here that resembles a proxy war with Iran.”
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
The Green Zone isn’t safe? Bush should have listened to Kermit the Frog instead of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s not easy being green, right?
it was looking ugly last night.
this morning was exponentially worse. and this afternoon was even more exponentially worse!
I think gilliard is going to be proved right…