Rising Violence in Iraq Spurs Fears of a New Sectarian War

[Purveyor]

Source: New York Times

BAGHDAD — In what appeared to be a new phase in an intensifying conflict that has raised fears of greater bloodshed and a wider sectarian war, Iraqi soldiers opened fire from helicopters on Sunni gunmen hiding in a northern village on Wednesday, officials said.

The air attacks were among clashes throughout the country between forces of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and Sunni gunmen that left at least 27 people dead and dozens wounded. The Sunni tribesmen were continuing a fight that began on Tuesday after the Iraqi Army stormed a Sunni protest encampment in the village of Hawija, leaving dozens dead and injured.

Several others were killed on Wednesday in explosions, including the detonation of a car bomb at a public market in the evening in a Shiite neighborhood north of Baghdad, and a roadside bomb attack on an army patrol in Tikrit, also in the north.

The deadliest battles occurred near Hawija and Sulaiman Pek, northern towns near Kirkuk, and battles were still raging in the early evening. In Hawija, the army shut off electricity, and troops shouted through loudspeakers, urging civilians to evacuate, witnesses said. Government helicopters also fired at Sunni gunmen on the ground in Sulaiman Pek.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/middleeast/with-air-attacks-sectarian-strife-intensifies-in-iraq.html?_r=0

[Marrah_G]

1. At this point we just really have to let them figure it out on their own

Either they will find a way to live with each other or not. No one can make them.

[Purveyor]

2. Make one proud doesn't? /sarcasm off

[Marrah_G]

3. So many lives lost for nothing n.t

[kardonb]

4. Iraq

if they want to kill each other off ., LET THEM ! Its their country , not ours .

[Ash_F]

5. For the record, USGov never tried to "figure it out"

From the start, they unilaterally disenfranchised the Sunni population. They thought this would be easy because it was a minority. I think it was Rumsfeld who said it would take six weeks at the start of the bombing. Of course, ten years of war later, we see none of that was true.

[Marrah_G]

6. Yup

[RiverNoord]

11. That sounds.... well, rather condescending, since

we're the morons who unleashed all the hell to begin with. We fired every single Baath party government staffer, even if their jobs had nothing at all to do with politics. They were largely Sunni. Then we disbanded the entire armed forces of the country. If you were former Baath, you no longer were welcome in the army. That means pretty much all the surviving skilled soldiers after the war lost their jobs. Very smart move, that - oh, and they were heavily Sunni.

Then Shia militias took revenge on Sunnis for years of oppression, ethnically cleansing major cities, such as... Baghdad! The Sunnis, some of whom were ex-military, did not care much for that - very ungrateful, they were, considering how we liberated them from that evil dictator Saddam...

Now we have a pro-Iranian fundamentalist Shia government that wants nothing to do with ex-Baath party folks, and they'll keep them out of any vestiges of power for as long as they can. We installed that government...

So - if we'd let 'them' 'figure it out' to begin with, by... well, not taking over the country by force, and not throwing out the entire government personnel infrastructure, and... well, you get the point.

[Marrah_G]

12. I don't mean it to sound condescending

We went in there and made a things far worse then they were before. The people of Iraq have to make this work without our interference, much like we did here 300 years ago. It has to be something they create, not something that people half a world away forced on them.

They have to work it out for themselves.

[frylock]

7. nobody could've ever predicted this..

except for those of us that did.

[underpants]

8. +

yes, we did

[marble falls]

9. I’m shocked, shocked to find that sectarian violence is going on in here.

[Bosonic]

10. Handy map for the emerging regional religous war

[John2]

13. Understanding History

and the United States' problem is very important. You can illustrate the problem more if you placed the number of Jews on this map. It would be a very small number in the state of Israel, which did not exist during World War II. The state of Israel disappeared for thousands of years, even during the times of the Roman Empire. It was known as Palestine even during that Era. The interest of Israel, did not fall on the United States until after World War II and it wasn't even passed on to the U.S. The British gave that authority to the U.N. and they did not want more Jews to settle in Palestine for good reasons. The Arabs were totally opposed to it but the U.S. was prepared to publicly embarrass the British because of the Jewish Holocaust. The British didn't want anything to do with Palestine after that and gave the authority to the U.N.

If any reasonable scholar would look at this through the lens of History, what the U.S. is trying to do want work, unless genocide is committed, similar to the Native Americans. That region went through decades, even centuries of indoctrination, mostly by conquests and through the Ottoman Empire. The United States cannot erase those beliefs by force. It is no different than the Enlightenment or Reformation periods that took place in Europe. Europe also went through 100 years of religious Wars. They use to burn people at the stake and cut off their heads for religious blasphemy. George W. Bush and many of the rightwing neocons are not very well intellectually endowed about World History. Islam is one of the three oldest religions in the World. Christianity had a tremendous influence on Western Civilization, and Islam had a tremendous influence in that part of the World. These people are just as committed to their faiths as Christians.