A particularly ugly crackdown by Iraqi troops against Sunni protesters in Hawija on Tuesday has started a new round of sectarian fighting in the nation’s north, with fighting in Mosul erupting overnight on Wednesday and continuing into Thursday, killing nearly 50 more.
Between Hawija, Mosul and several other smaller incidents, over 200 people have been killed in sectarian fighting in the past three days, and clashes in major cities across the nation.
But while there’s seemingly a constant major problem of violence in Iraq, the new sectarian clashes could really threaten a breakout of fighting that could resemble the grimmest days of the US occupation.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seems to be trying to downplay the incidents, but months of unanswered peaceful protests by Sunni have left a built-in level of unrest that could be ready to explode, while pressure has both the Kurdish blocs and the Iraqiya bloc on the brink of withdrawing from the government, forcing new elections.
Friday is always a big day for protests, and could be a real test for just how much the situation has deteriorated in the past week.
I think it was Colin Powell who said if we attack Iraq we will own Iraq Now it looks like instead of liberatimg Iraq we only destabalized Iraq. I know most of the Christians have been driven from their homes in Iraq . I just wonder hpw much more the Iraqi's are going to have to suffer before even 1/2 the Iraqis get back to where they were before we liberated them
Destabilization was a large part of the "Grand Plan" of the neocons. Once accomplished, the region would devolve into anarchy with normally stable regimes crumbling at the hands of Islamic radicals and extremists – such as Egypt, Libya, Syria and Jordan. The idea was that once destabilized, the US could swoop in and sit comfortably on the energy reserves. Problem was that the competence required to pull it off was absent except for the ideological hacks in way over their heads.
I thought it was about stopping Saddam from over pumping the oil, at least that seems the most credible. Freeing people is such a joke that only ignorant people believe.
If only they could all stop and listen to Carl Sagan for a few minutes:
After the Shah fell, Israel needed Saddam to counter Iran's islamic ideology with good old secular stalinism, and Turkey needed a fellow secularist to squish the Kurds for them. Syria hooked up with Iran to keep the oil-fed and Russian armed Saddam from seducing the old Syrian ba'athists into treason and letting him expand his holdings to the sea. The Israelis got spooked as Saddam's war with Iran went sour and he looked unstable while Hezbollah grew stronger through Syria's dependence upon Iran to twist Saddam's tail. So Israel had ITS puppet, the US Military, remove Saddam, hoping for a good old Shah=like dictator. Nobody seems to have noticed the huge Shi'ite masses or any other facts on the ground. But it was not a neocon policy to attack Iraq; it was Israel's