Can Iraq be Fixed?
Politicians dance around this question, but here's the reality: It will take U.S. troops years of work, and success is hardly a sure bet
But the street violence has become so endemic in Baghdad that many experts have been debating whether or not the country is already in a low-level civil war. Regardless of the answer, the sectarian strife has the potential to tear Iraq apart--and is now seen as a bigger danger than the insurgency. The sectarian fighting broke out into the open after the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, but it had been building for many months. Bullet-riddled corpses, and an alarming number of headless bodies, turn up on the capital's streets daily.
Now, the death toll is huge and getting worse each month. Iraqi statistics show that over 14,000 civilians were killed in the first half of this year--in June, it was more than 100 per day, even after the launch of a Baghdad security plan that was supposed to reduce the carnage. The resulting spiral of violence is threatening any remaining trust between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites. As a consequence, a growing number of Iraqis are fleeing their homes in mixed neighborhoods. The United Nations reports some 150,000 Iraqis have been displaced, which is almost certainly too low an estimate. Quietly, some in Baghdad are beginning to call it ethnic cleansing. "It is both alarming and underreported," says a western diplomat in Baghdad. "It is conceivable that most of Baghdad will become ethnic enclaves--it is getting there pretty quickly."
Behind closed doors, U.S. officials are telling Iraqis that they need to deal urgently with the problem of militias--both those inside the police and those run privately by Shiite leaders. For Maliki, this would mean confronting some of the same Shiite leaders who helped bring him into office. "There is not indefinite time to do this," says a senior U.S. official in Baghdad. "This sectarian killing eats at the fabric of the basic compact between the three communities."
If there is a bright side, it is that for the first time, this pattern of violence is not exacerbated by the presence of U.S. troops. Indeed, U.S. soldiers have been one of the few brakes on the killings. But the lines are getting blurry for U.S. troops, who increasingly find themselves caught in the middle. "There has been a shift in how coalition forces are received in predominantly Shiite areas due to their belief that we now favor the Sunnis because we tried so hard to bring them into the democratic process," says Maj. Mark Cheadle of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, responsible for security in Baghdad. "Neither side, in general, seems particularly enthused with our aiding the other sect."
Security Forces. One desperate need, of course, is for capable security forces that reflect Iraq's sectarian makeup. But a graduation day last April at Camp Habbaniyah training center remains a demoralizing and cautionary tale. Some 1,000 newly commissioned Sunni soldiers from the insurgent-ridden Anbar province were parading before the review stands filled with proud U.S. and Iraqi military officials. Suddenly, the highly anticipated ceremony fell apart. The graduates started "taking off their uniforms and throwing them on the ground," recalls Col. Lawrence Nicholson, who commands Marine Regimental Combat Team 5, which trains Iraqi security forces in western Iraq. "It was ugly." They had just learned that they would not be serving, as they expected, in their hometowns because of leadership concerns that locally recruited graduates would be more likely to collaborate with the insurgency.
advertisement
