Gwynne Dyer: Civil war at last?
newvision: "We must cooperate and work together against this danger...of civil war," said Iraq's President Jalal Talabani, but others think that the civil war has already arrived. At least 130 people, almost all of them Sunnis, were murdered in reprisal killings, and over a hundred Sunni mosques attacked, in the 24 hours after the destruction of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra, sacred to the Shias, on February 22. But it is not yet time to say Iraq has slid irrevocably into civil war.
The casualties of the sectarian violence in Iraq are already comparable to those in the Lebanese civil war -- a couple of dozen killed on slow days, a hundred or so on the worst days -- but Iraq has about eight times as many people as Lebanon, so there is still some distance to go. Iraq may never go the full distance, because it is hard to hold a proper civil war unless the different ethnic or religious groups hold separate territories.
The Kurds do, of course, and it is unlikely that the fighting will ever spread to the north of what now is Iraq, for Kurdistan is already effectively a separate country with its own army. The Kurds are currently allied with the Shia Arab religious parties of southern Iraq who control politics in the Arabic-speaking 80% of Iraq, but even if that alliance broke the Shias could not take back the north. The worst that might happen is ethnic cleansing around Kirkuk and its oilfields, where Saddam Hussein encouraged Arab settlement to erode Kurdish dominance of the area.
Southern Iraq is already controlled by the militias of the Shia religious parties, and has only a small minority of Sunnis. Baghdad and the "Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq are the only potential battlegrounds of an Iraqi civil war, but even there it is hard to have a real civil war, because only one side has an army.
The old, predominantly Sunni Arab army of Iraq was disbanded by proconsul Paul Bremer soon after the American occupation of Iraq. The new army and police force being trained by the US forces are almost entirely Shia (except in Kurdistan, where they are entirely Kurdish). Indeed, many of Iraq's soldiers are members of existing Shia and Kurdish militias who have been shifted onto the payroll of the state.
So how can you have a civil war? Read more
The casualties of the sectarian violence in Iraq are already comparable to those in the Lebanese civil war -- a couple of dozen killed on slow days, a hundred or so on the worst days -- but Iraq has about eight times as many people as Lebanon, so there is still some distance to go. Iraq may never go the full distance, because it is hard to hold a proper civil war unless the different ethnic or religious groups hold separate territories.
The Kurds do, of course, and it is unlikely that the fighting will ever spread to the north of what now is Iraq, for Kurdistan is already effectively a separate country with its own army. The Kurds are currently allied with the Shia Arab religious parties of southern Iraq who control politics in the Arabic-speaking 80% of Iraq, but even if that alliance broke the Shias could not take back the north. The worst that might happen is ethnic cleansing around Kirkuk and its oilfields, where Saddam Hussein encouraged Arab settlement to erode Kurdish dominance of the area.
Southern Iraq is already controlled by the militias of the Shia religious parties, and has only a small minority of Sunnis. Baghdad and the "Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq are the only potential battlegrounds of an Iraqi civil war, but even there it is hard to have a real civil war, because only one side has an army.
The old, predominantly Sunni Arab army of Iraq was disbanded by proconsul Paul Bremer soon after the American occupation of Iraq. The new army and police force being trained by the US forces are almost entirely Shia (except in Kurdistan, where they are entirely Kurdish). Indeed, many of Iraq's soldiers are members of existing Shia and Kurdish militias who have been shifted onto the payroll of the state.
So how can you have a civil war? Read more
posted by exoplanet at 7:44 PM
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