[Peace-discuss] What we've done

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Just another day in Iraq: 100 more fathers,
	mothers, sons and daughters killed
	By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaquin, Diyala Province, Iraq
	Published: 17 July 2007

The United States surge, the use of the American troop reinforcements to 
bring violence in Iraq under control, is bloodily failing across 
northern Iraq. That was proved again yesterday when a suicide bomber 
detonated a truck packed with explosives in Kirkuk killing at least 85 
people and wounding a further 183.

The truck bomb blasted a 30ft-deep crater in a busy road full of small 
shops and booths near the ancient citadel of Kirkuk, setting fire to a 
bus in which the passengers burned to death and burying many others 
under the rubble. Dozens of cars were set ablaze and their blackened 
hulks littered the street. Some 25 of the wounded suffered critical 
injuries and may not live.

In Baghdad, at least 44 people were killed or found dead across the 
city, police said. They included the bullet-riddled bodies of 25 people, 
apparent victims of sectarian death squads.

The attack is the latest assault by Sunni insurgents on Kurds who claim 
Kirkuk as their future capital.

Adnan Sarhan, 30, lost both his eyes and had his back broken in the 
blast. He lay on the operating table as his anguished mother, Mahiya 
Qadir, sat nearby with her daughter-in-law. "Will I ever see my son 
alive again?" she asked.

Two more car bombs blew up later in Kirkuk but caused few casualties.

The dispatch of 28,000 extra troops to Iraq starting in January, and the 
more aggressive deployment of the US army in the country is not working. 
At best it is moving violence from one area of Iraq to another. The US 
is allying itself to local tribes and militias against guerrillas but 
that is angering the government in Baghdad and deepening the violence.

In Diyala, a mixed Shia-Sunni-Kurdish province south of Kirkuk and 
north-east of Baghdad, the US launched an offensive against al-Qa'ida 
and Sunni insurgent forces three weeks ago. It claimed to have killed 
many guerrillas and forced others to flee.

Hamdi Hassan Zubaydi, the Sunni leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party in 
Diyala, painted a very different picture. He described how some of the 
Sunni tribesmen had joined US troops to storm al-Qa'ida-held villages 
and had killed 100 insurgents. But when the US withdrew, al-Qa'ida 
returned and drove the tribesmen out.

Mr Zubaydi, who was jailed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, quivered with 
disgust as he explained the bloody complexities of sectarian war in Diyala.

The tough-looking former teacher in his fifties said 20 Sunni students 
on a bus had been abducted and he feared they would be killed. He said 
he knew who had carried out the kidnapping: "It was the emergency police 
forces led by Captain Abbas Waisi and Lt Zaman Abdul Hamid. I told the 
American special forces but they have done nothing."

We met Mr Zubaydi in the office of the Mayor of Khanaqin, a Kurdish 
enclave in northern Diyala, where he had come to ask for help. We had 
reached there through Kurdish-controlled territory along the right bank 
of the Diyala river that runs parallel to the Iranian border. Kurdish 
control ends at a disheveled town called Khalar where we crossed the 
river over a long, rickety metal bridge with old tyres marking places 
where metal slats had fallen into the waters below. We picked up armed 
guards and then circled round behind Khanaqin to enter from the east.

Mr Zubaydi had a shorter but more dangerous route to Khanaqin from a 
town called Muqdadiyah, a few miles to the west of Khaniaqin, which he 
accurately described as "the most dangerous place in Iraq". His house 
had been attacked five times in the past month.

He was beset by the Sunni insurgents of al-Qa'ida on one side and the 
Shia militia of the Mehdi Army on the other. He gave an impressive list 
of the Iraqi security forces available in Muqdadiyah, in addition to a 
US battalion, including 1,200 police and 1,600 army.

The problem is that nobody is quite sure on which side the Iraqi 
security forces are planning to fight. Often they do nothing: "The house 
of the deputy police chief is just 10 metres from a police station but 
somebody blew it up," Mr Zubaydi said scornfully. He ran through a list 
of police and army commanders in Diyala, all of whom were Shia and 
unlikely to help the Sunnis.

There are at least three different wars being fought in northern Iraq: 
Sunni against Americans; Shia against Sunni; Arabs against Kurds. 
Alliances can switch. The Kurds are the Americans' only sincere ally in 
Iraq but many of them are also convinced that the Americans in Kirkuk 
city have a tacit understanding with the Arab insurgents not to attack 
each other.

The US does not want to be seen as siding with the Kurds in their 
struggle to join Kirkuk and its oil fields to their semi-independent 
enclave, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in a referendum due at 
the end of the year. The US is restraining the Kurds but this may be 
more difficult after yesterday's bombings. "If we wanted to do so, we 
[Kurds] could secure as far as Khalis," a town far to the south of 
Kirkuk in Diyala Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani 
president of the KRG, told me.

The US is caught in quagmire of its own making. Such successes as it 
does have are usually the result of tenuous alliances with previously 
hostile tribes, insurgent groups or militias. The British experience in 
Basra was that these marriages of convenience with local gangs weakened 
the central government and contributed to anarchy in Iraq. They did not 
work in the long term.

	###