Adding to the appearance that the recently “liberated” city of Fallujah is a military target for Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated government, Shi’ite militias continue to make their presence felt across the city, with returning residents, almost exclusively Sunni Arabs, feeling they are returning to a city less liberated than ever.
Amid reports of looting by militia members, locals are also reporting the militiamen generally making a nuisance of themselves, and painting Shi’ite slogans as graffiti on bridge overpasses around the city, while chanting Shi’ite slogans.
This has been a problem across Iraq, where the recovery of mostly Sunni cities from ISIS is followed by often violent purges by the militias, which makes reintegrating those cities as proper parts of Iraq all but impossible.
Sheikh Hadi Abdullah, one Fallujah resident, says the government treats Fallujah as “the center of terrorism in Iraq, but for us it’s the center of resistance.”
Indeed, the only way ISIS got Fallujah in the first place was because public unrest got so bad that the Iraqi government had virtually abandoned the city. ISIS may be gone, but the grievances against the Shi’ite government are as big as ever.
The author ignores the fact that Shiites — not only in Iraq but throughout the world — have since our US Government’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 been the target of terrorist attacks by Sunni extremists SOLELY BECAUSE THE SHIITES ARE CONSIDERED WORTHY OF KILLING AS NON-BELIEVERS IN THE SUNNI EXTREMISTS’ TWISTED INTERPRETATION OF ISLAM. There has never been and is not now any such religiously based justification by Shiites for murdering Sunnis. To the extent that the Sunnis in Fallujah and elsewhere have accepted and supported such murderous Sunni religious extremists, it is difficult to see what the Iraqi government could have done other than what they have tried to do: attack the murderous extremists wherever they are located. If the supposedly “moderate” Sunnis in Fallujah prefer ISIS and Al Qaeda to the Iraqi government, what does that say about how “moderate” those Sunni supporters of terrorists really are?
You seem to ignore the revenge factor by the Shia militias after 40+ years of Sunni/Baathist control.