Towards Civil War in Iraq

'Worse Than Syria'? Civil War in Iraq 'Has Already Started'

Though receiving little international attention, the situation is putting Iraq on verge of "total collapse"

Jon Queally, staff writer

Common Dreams,

3 May, 2013

“It is wrong to say [Iraq is] getting close to a civil war... The civil war has already started.”

That's what one Iraqi politician tells theIndependent's Patrick Cockburn as the British foreign correspondent explores the undercurrents of growing violence and political conflict in the country still reeling and destabilized from more than a decade of war and an entire generation beset by Western sanctions, military intervention, and occupation.

If things in Iraq continue to deteriorate, the politician predicts the results "will be worse than Syria."

April in Iraq was the most deadly month in more than five years and many Iraqi politicians inside the country and outside experts are now saying that its not a question of when a civil war will break out, but that the violence now being witnessed proves a civil war—in many ways—is already underway.

As Cockburn reports:

The situation has suddenly deteriorated since the killing of at least 36 Sunni Arab protesters at a sit-in in Hawijah on 23 April. An observer in Baghdad, who did not want to be named, said “ever since, Hawijah people are frightened of a return to the massacres of 2006.” She added that Sunni and Shia were avoiding going into each others’ areas. Signs of deteriorating security are everywhere. Al-Qa’ida showed its reach on Monday when five car bombs blew up in overwhelmingly Shia southern Iraq, leaving 21 dead. The Sunni fundamentalist group, which had a resurgence in 2012, is responsible for killing a majority of the almost 1,500 Iraqis who have died in political violence so far this year.

Its members are now able to roam freely in Anbar province where a year ago they were a secretive underground movement. In neighbouring Kirkuk, al-Qa’ida last week seized the town of Sulaiman Bec, shot the chief of police, stormed the police station and departed with their weapons after agreeing a truce with the Iraqi army.

Earlier this week, a report titled Mission Unaccomplished, released by the UK-based War Child, found that the situation inside Iraq was "one of the world's most neglected" ongoing crises and warned that a "total collapse of the state" remained a distinct possibility if the situation did not improve.

But, if Cockburn's reporting accurately reflects the dynamics inside Iraq, it appears that the situation is about to get dramatically worse, not better.

He spoke with one high-level official within the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the north who described just how bad things have become, especially regarding the growing Sunni insurgency that is fueling a large amount of the recent violence.

"The western part of the country is caught up in an uprising against the government," said Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the KRG President Massoud Barzani. "We don’t want to have a second Syria here and we are heading in that direction. The fire is very bad and we don’t have many firemen.”

And Cockburn expands on how the crisis in neighboring Syria is "cross-infecting" the tensions and violence inside Iraq, writing:

The two-year-old uprising of the Sunni in Syria encouraged their compatriots in Iraq, who share a common frontier, to start their own protests. These began last December and, until the army killed and injured scores of protesters at Hawijah, were largely peaceful. 

The Iraqi Sunni drew strength from the fact that, while they are a minority in their own country, they are a majority in the region.

The revolts in the two countries are ever more running in parallel. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq last month announced that it had founded the al-Nusra Front, the most effective Syrian rebel military force, devoted half its budget to support it and sent experienced al-Qa’ida fighters to Syria as reinforcements.

When Syrian government soldiers fled into Iraq in March and were being repatriated to Syria, some 47 of them were ambushed and killed at Akashat close to the Syrian border. The rebels claim that the Shia-dominated Iraqi government is becoming a more active supporter of President Bashar al-Assad. Rebels reported last week that an Iraqi air force aircraft had bombed their forces at Deir Ez-Zhor in eastern Syria.

April Iraq's deadliest month in five years - UN

April 2013 was Iraq's deadliest month since June 2008, the United Nations mission in Iraq says.

BBC

2 May, 2013

It said a total of 712 people were killed, including 595 civilians, in "acts of terrorism and acts of violence" last month.

Iraq's Interior Ministry puts the total death toll for April at 245 people.

An army raid on a Sunni anti-government protest camp in northern Iraq last week has triggered a sharp increase in attacks.

Baghdad was the worst affected governorate with a total of 211 killed and 486 injured, the United Nations Assistance Mission For Iraq (UNAMI) said in a statement released on Thursday.

The mission says Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk, Ninewa and Anbar were the next most affected provinces.

A spate of bombing attacks in the last two weeks has left more than 200 people dead and scores injured.

Fourteen members of a Sunni militia opposed to al-Qaeda were killed in two attacks by militants near the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on 1 May.

At least 18 people were killed and dozens injured by five car bombs in Shia-majority provinces of southern Iraq on 29 April.

The latest figures come at a time when tensions are high between Iraq's Sunni and Shia, amid claims by the majority Sunni Muslim communities that they are being marginalised by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Shia-led government.

More than 20 people were killed in clashes between security forces and Sunni Arab protesters in northern Iraq on 23 April.

The violence erupted when security forces raided an anti-government protest camp in Hawija, near Kirkuk.

There was also widespread violence before the 20 April provincial elections - the first elections since the last US troops withdrew at the end of December 2011.

Dozens were killed in bombings targeting mainly Shia areas, and 14 candidates, most of them Sunnis, were murdered.

Although levels of violence in Iraq have dropped since the heights of the insurgency in 2006 and 2007, current unrest is more widespread than at any time since the US military withdrawal