06 May 2013

Is Iraq also heading toward civil war?

We don't hear much about Iraq in the mainstream media these days.  Here are excerpts from a story at Truthdig, which may or may not be important:
After the deadliest month of political fighting in five years, Iraq appears to be sliding rapidly into a new civil war that “will be worse than Syria,” leaders say. The escalating violence has residents of Baghdad stocking up on rice, vegetables and other foods in case fighting or curfews prevent them from getting to shops. “It is wrong to say we are getting close to a civil war,” a senior Iraqi politician said. “The civil war has already started... 

“The crises in Iraq and Syria are now cross-infecting each other. 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...

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is floundering in its response. In dealing with the four-month-old protest movement by the Sunni Arabs, a fifth of Iraq’s population, who say they are treated as second-class citizens, he varies between denouncing them as terrorists and admitting that they have real grievances...

The Iraqi government depends on an alliance between the Shia and the Kurds who, before the US invasion of 2003, were oppressed by the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein.

3 comments:

  1. Wasn't it Rumsfeld who said, "This is what democracy looks like."

    Our proud legacy of freedom...

    ReplyDelete
  2. *another* civil war. They've already essentially had one.

    ReplyDelete