If recent events are any indicator, conflict in Iraq between the Shiite government and Sunni protestors is heating up to the point where civil war may be inevitable. Just this last week there was a marked increase in terror attacks. More than 77 were killed on Monday alone and the total of the week amounts to around 250, including two dozen government-aligned police officers. Now the conflict is going even further, as the Sunni tribal leaders have stepped forward to demand that they be made into an autonomous region or the violence will continue.
Most of the week’s attacks occurred in the capital city of Baghdad and the surrounding areas. They consisted of car and suicide bombings, most of the targets in Shia neighborhoods and two of them in Shia mosques. The officers mostly died during a raid conducted to rescue officers that had been kidnapped, though six fell victim to direct militant attacks on police stations.
The government response has been to call an emergency session to talk about security in the country and how to improve the situation. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki stated that he was going to change the way security was being handled, including replacing many of the high-level officers currently in charge. To his credit, he did state that the tribal demand for autonomy was a reasonable discussion, although he insisted that they would have to go through the correct legal processes to implement it.
As if the continuing violence isn’t already enough for the country to handle, it looks as if the Sunni-Shiite split is being more closely tied to politics in Syria. The Sunni rebels are siding with the Syrian rebels while the Shiite government is taking Assad’s side in the conflict. This means that countries such as Turkey will be Sunni allies and others, such as Russia and Iran, may be Shiite allies. This makes the Iraqi conflict more important on the wider international political stage.
The events of the nest few weeks could see the outcome of this strife, whether the country degenerates into civil war or the government becomes more compliant to Sunni demands. Whatever the answer, more innocents will continue to die as people struggle for power and sectarian domination in this long-standing rivalry.
Iraq car bomb photo courtesy of Ronald Shaw via Wikicommons
