http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=2813&click_id=2813&art_id=vn20060409080413795C572991&set_id=6
Iraq - now the most dangerous country
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April 09 2006 at
08:04AM
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By
Patrick Cockburn
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London
- A cruel and bloody civil war has started in Iraq,
a country which George Bush, the United States president, and Tony
Blair, the British prime minister, promised to free from fear and establish
democracy.
I have been visiting Iraq
since 1978, but for the first time, I am becoming convinced that the country
will not survive.
Three suicide bombers disguised themselves as women on Friday in the bloodiest
attack in four months. With explosives hidden by long black cloaks, they killed
79 people and wounded more than 160 when they blew themselves up in a Shia
mosque in the capital.
One bomber came through the women's security checkpoint at the Buratha mosque
in northern Baghdad
and detonated explosives just as worshippers were leaving at the end of Friday
prayers. Two other bombers took advantage of the confusion to blow themselves
up a few seconds later, killing the people who were trying to escape.
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'Never seen the
situation so grim'
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The savage attack came almost exactly on the third
anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by American and British armies
on April 9 2003. The war was portrayed at the time as freeing Iraqis from fear,
but Iraqi officials said that at least 100 people are being killed in Baghdad every day.
Yesterday 11 bullet-ridden bodies were reported found across the country.
The slaughter of Shi'a Muslims in the Buratha mosque will probably lead to
revenge attacks against Sunni Arabs whose community harbours the Salafi and
jihadi fanatics who see the Shi'a as heretics, as worthy of death as Iraqi
Christians or American or British soldiers. Ever since the bombing of the Al
Askari shrine in Samara on February 22, the Shi'a militias have retaliated
whenever Shias are killed.
The bombing of the mosque, a religious complex linked to the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
pushes Iraq
well down the road to outright civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
I have been covering the war in Iraq
ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so
grim. I was in the northern city of Mosul
last week protected by 3 000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so, it was considered
too dangerous to send out heavily armed patrols in daytime.
It is safer at night because of a curfew. In March alone, the US military
said that 1 313 people had been killed in sectarian attacks. Many bodies,
buried or thrown into rivers, are never found. The real figure is probably
twice as high. All over the country people are on the move as Sunni and Shia
flee each other's areas.
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'Baghdad
today resembles Beirut
then'
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I was in Lebanon at the
start of the civil war in 1975. Baghdad today
resembles Beirut
then. People are being murdered solely because of their religious identity.
A friend called to say he had a problem because his two half-brothers had been
born in Fallujah, the Sunni stronghold, and this was on their identity cards.
If they were picked up by Shi'a militiamen, a glance at their place of birth
alone could get them killed.
The same friend had taken his mother and two sisters to the passport office in Baghdad so that they
could leave the country. While they were there, a bomb went off, killing 25
policemen outside and breaking his sister's leg. Now the family cannot leave
the country because his sister is in hospital and his mother is too frightened
to return to get a new passport.
For the past three years, Bush and Blair have continually understated the
gravity of what is taking place. It has been frustrating as a journalist to
hear them claim that much of Iraq
is peaceful when we could not prove them wrong without being killed or
kidnapped.
The capture of Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty in 2004, the
elections and new constitution in 2005 have all been oversold to the outside
world as signs of progress. The formation of a government of national unity is
now being presented as an antidote to violence.
"Terrorists love a vacuum," said John Reid, Britain's defence secretary, citing his experience
in Northern Ireland.
But one Iraqi official remarked caustically that the three main communities -
Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish - do not "hate each other because they do not
have a government, but rather they do not have a government because they
already hate each other".
The coalition of religious parties, the United Iraqi Alliance, won almost half
the seats in the 275-member parliament in the election on December 15. They
fear that the US and Britain
are trying to break up the Shia coalition and deny them the fruits of their
victory.
This is why they have resisted demands from Washington
and London for
Ibrahim al-Jaafari to stand down as prime minister. Even if a national-unity
government is formed, it will control little outside the Green Zone.
The army and police take their orders from the leaders of their own
communities. Three years ago, when the statue of Hussein was toppled, Iraqis
were promised their lives would get better. Instead, Iraq has become the most dangerous
place in the world. - Foreign Service
