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From Ha'aretz (Jerusalem)
Dated Thursday January 1
By Zvi Bar'el
The six bullets fired last week in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul killed a Turkmen Iraqi judge. A few days earlier in the Shi'ite city of Najaf, a mortar was discovered with its muzzle pointing at the offices of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the largest Shi'ite organizations represented on the nation's temporary ruling council. The same week, a large bomb exploded near the offices of this organization in Baghdad and killed one of its senior members. An affiliated school was shelled, with one person killed and 10 wounded. A prominent Sunni mosque in the Azmiyye quarter of Baghdad was attacked at the same time, also resulting in damage and several wounded. A few days later, a large bomb exploded next to the Kurdish Interior Ministry offices in the Kurdish city of Irbil, killing three people. In Kirkuk, fighting broke out between Kurdish and Arab students, and between Kurds and Turkmens.
The recent series of events in Iraq suggests a new trend; clashes with ethnic and religious undercurrents. It's not really new. Political killings have punctuated the American occupation almost from the first few days after the war itself was concluded, but now they've been augmented by open political battles. Last week, the senior Sunni leadership gathered to set up a political council to watch out for the interests of their sector, whose leaders fear being sidelined as the opening of the temporary governing council approaches. The Shi'ite religious leadership and the Shi'ite secular leadership represented on the temporary governing council are divided over the question of how the council's members are to be named in preparation for the handing over of the reigns to a transitional legislature in July. The Kurds, for their part, have already launched a political arrangement designed to secure their aspirations with respect to autonomy, if not their nationalist aspirations. All this political maneuvering guarantees that even after the capture of Saddam Hussein, the level of violence in Iraq is not going to decrease.
Two main centers of political infighting are now operating in Iraq. Within the Shi'ite community, encompassing the majority of the country's population, there is disagreement among secular figures named to the transitional governing council and religious figures on the council, some of whom represent religious organizations while others are followers of leading Shi'ite clerics . . . .
The reality in the field is stirring emotions in the Kurdish camp as well. "If the Americans neglect Kurdish interests, the Kurds will have to look out for themselves," wrote Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, a Kurdish commentator, last week. He means that the Kurds have suddenly wondered if their aspirations for a federated state, in which the Kurds would have broad autonomy along with an important part in running Iraq, will go down the drain if the American plan is implemented. "Now we see that the Americans mean a federation of regions, not a federation on an ethnic or religious basis," as one senior figure in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Jalal Talabani, recently commented to Haaretz.
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