WASHINGTON - Halfway through the
implementation of President George W Bush's
"surge" strategy to enhance security in Baghdad
and Iraq's predominantly Sunni Muslim al-Anbar
province, evidence that it is turning the tide
nationwide is hard to come by.
While
civilian deaths in the Iraqi capital have fallen
from the levels before the surge was launched two
months ago, the five horrific bombings that killed
nearly 200 people in mainly Shi'ite areas of
Baghdad on Wednesday marked
one of the highest daily tolls since the US
invasion more than four years ago.
The
bombings followed last week's attack in the heart
of the US-controlled Green Zone when a suicide
bomber blew himself up in the Iraqi Parliament's
cafeteria, killing one person and wounding seven
others.
Moreover, the increasingly
frequent bombings, many of which have been
followed by spontaneous popular demonstrations
against US troops and Iraqi security forces, have
sparked fears that Shi'ite militias, which have
been relatively inactive since Bush announced the
"surge" in January, may re-emerge to exact revenge
against the Sunni population.
Those fears
were compounded by the withdrawal from the
government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
earlier this week of six cabinet ministers loyal
to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi militia, by far
the largest paramilitary group in Iraq, is
believed to have been responsible for much of the
death-squad activity against Baghdad's Sunni
residents before the "surge".
Indeed, 25
bodies, all showing signs of torture and summary
execution, were found on Baghdad's streets on
Wednesday, adding to mounting evidence over the
past two weeks that Shi'ite militias have begun
taking revenge.
In addition, what advances
have been made on the security front have not been
matched by progress in achieving national
reconciliation, a point noted even by US Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates after visiting Baghdad
this week.
Constitutional amendments and
other legislation designed to reassure Sunnis
about their place in a post-Baathist Iraq that
were supposed to have been approved last year have
made virtually no headway.
The "surge"
strategy, which called for the addition of some
30,000 troops to the 140,000 marines and soldiers
already deployed in Iraq as of February, was based
on the assumption that securing Baghdad was
essential for preventing an all-out sectarian war
between Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias and
creating the political space necessary to
reconcile the two sects.
The plan called
for almost all of the additional troops, as well
as thousands more Iraqi soldiers and police, to
patrol neighborhoods in the capital to guarantee
security and even begin to reverse the ethnic
cleansing that over the past year or so
transformed many mixed districts into segregated
enclaves dominated by armed groups of one sect or
the other. About half of the new troops have been
deployed so far.
The plan has registered
some successes, according to the Bush
administration and its supporters, although they
concede that a final judgment cannot be delivered
until the "surge" reaches its peak in June or
July. Not only has death-squad activity in Baghdad
remained below pre-"surge" levels, but several
hundred families who had been forced to leave
their homes in mixed areas have returned,
according to the Pentagon.
Right now, the
signs are more hopeful than they have been in many
months, according to Frederick Kagan, a military
historian at the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), echoing similar
statements by other champions of the "surge",
notably Republican Senator John McCain, as well as
Bush himself.
Writing in the conservative
Weekly Standard, Kagan also pointed to recent
reports that Sunni tribes in al-Anbar, the other
focus of the "surge", have increasingly turned
against al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamist extremist
group which Washington says is responsible for
most of the recent anti-Shi'ite violence,
including the recent car bombings.
But
even if the "surge" makes further progress in
Baghdad - a possibility that depends on the
prevention of a new escalation of sectarian
violence in the wake of the most recent bombings -
developments outside the capital could still
overwhelm it.
Even as the death toll in
Baghdad has diminished over the last two months
compared with late 2006, casualties among
civilians and soldiers alike have risen about 10%
over the same period, according to a recent
military report.
Violence has been
particularly intense in the north. Tal Afar, which
had been pacified last year by a
counter-insurgency effort that has been cited as a
model for the "surge" strategy, suffered the war's
single deadliest attack last month when a suicide
truck bombing killed 152 people in a predominantly
Shi'ite area. The bombing set off revenge killings
of some 70 Sunni civilians by Shi'ite militia and
police.
Sectarian violence and attacks on
US forces have also become so intense over the
past two months in Diyala province, northeast of
Baghdad, that US commanders felt compelled in
March to divert hundreds of soldiers from
elsewhere in the country.
"While violence
against Iraqis is down in some Baghdad
neighborhoods where we have 'surged' forces, it is
up dramatically in the belt ringing Baghdad,"
noted Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman
Joseph Biden last week. "Essentially, when we
squeeze the water balloon in one place, it bulges
somewhere else."
Southern Iraq, especially
oil-rich Basra province, has also become
increasingly violent as a result of an
intra-Shi'ite conflict between Sadr's forces and
their rivals, particularly the Badr Brigade of the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI) and another armed party, Fadhila.
The violence there not only threatens to
further weaken the Maliki government and the
Shi'ite coalition on which it is based, but could,
if it deteriorates further, threaten key
oil-export infrastructure that is essential to
keeping Iraq's tattered economy afloat.
Tensions and violence are also on the rise
in the other major oil-producing region of Iraq,
Kirkuk, which Kurdish leaders hope to bring under
their control as a result of a referendum that is
bitterly opposed by the city's Arab and Turkmen
residents but which, according to the
constitution, is supposed to take place before the
end of this year.
If the referendum is
held later this year over the objections of the
other communities, the civil war is very likely to
spread to Kirkuk and the Kurdish region, according
to a report issued on Thursday by the
International Crisis Group (ICG), which accused
Washington of ignoring the looming crisis there
due to its preoccupation with Baghdad.
Washington's failure so far to persuade
the Kurds to postpone the referendum has also
added to growing tensions with neighboring Turkey,
a NATO [North AtlanticTreaty Organization] ally of
the US, which has sent several high-level
delegations to Washington in recent weeks to
express its concern over both Kirkuk and the
failure of Kurdistan's authorities to prevent
cross-border raids by Kurdish Workers Party (PKK)
guerrillas against Turkish targets.
Last
week, Turkey's top military commander, General
Yaser Buyukanit, called publicly for his forces to
be permitted to take military action against the
PKK in northern Iraq, a possibility that observers
here see as increasingly likely and one that could
embroil Iraq's one peaceful region in a major new
conflict. Of bad news in Iraq, it seems there is
no end, wrote a Washington Post columnist this
week with respect to the looming crisis between
Turkey and the Kurds.
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