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04/09/2006:

"Iraqi official: 'It's civil war'"

A senior official in the Iraqi government has for the first time admitted the country is in a state of civil war.

Deputy interior minister Hussein Ali Kamal said Iraq had been in "undeclared" civil war for the past year.

He told reporters: "Actually Iraq has been in an undeclared civil war for the past 12 months.

"On a daily basis Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians are being killed and the only undeclared thing is that a civil war has not been officially announced by the parties involved. Civil war is happening but not on a wide scale."

Mr Kamal's admission mirrors the words of former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi who last month said Iraq was in civil war. Mr Allawi warned that the violence was reaching the point of no return and Europe and the USA would not be spared the consequences.

But British ministers have repeatedly denied civil war is either imminent or inevitable. Criticising anti-war protesters, Defence Secretary John Reid recently suggested those who argued that Iraq was on the brink of civil war were siding with the terrorists.
itv.com


U.S. Study Paints Somber Portrait of Iraqi Discord
WASHINGTON, April 8 — An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces "serious" and one "critical." The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.

The report, 10 pages of briefing points titled "Provincial Stability Assessment," underscores the shift in the nature of the Iraq war three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.

There are alerts about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south. The authors also point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.

The patterns of discord mapped by the report confirm that ethnic and religious schisms have become entrenched across much of the country, even as monthly American fatalities have fallen. Those indications, taken with recent reports of mass migrations from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, show that Iraq is undergoing a de facto partitioning along ethnic and sectarian lines, with clashes — sometimes political, sometimes violent — taking place in those mixed areas where different groups meet.


The War Gets More Grim Every Day
I have been covering the war in Iraq ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so grim. I was in the northern city of Mosul last week protected by 3,000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so it was considered too dangerous to send out heavily armed patrols in day time. It is safer at night because of a rigorously enforced curfew. In March alone the US military said 1,313 people were killed in sectarian attacks. Many bodies, buried in pits or thrown in the rivers, are never found. The real figure is probably twice as high. All over the country people are on the move as Sunni and Shi'ites flee each other's areas.

I was in Lebanon at the start of the civil war there in 1975. Baghdad today resembles Beirut then. People are being hauled from their cars and murdered solely because of their religious identity. A friend called to say that he had a problem because his two half brothers had been born in Fallujah, the Sunni Muslim stronghold, and this was on their identity cards. If they were picked up by Shiah militiamen or Interior Ministry troops a glance at their place of birth alone could get them killed.

Fleeing one danger in Baghdad it is easy to become victim of another. The same friend had taken his mother and two sisters to the passport office in central Baghdad so they could leave the country. While they were there a large bomb went off killing 25 policemen outside and breaking his sister's leg. Now the family cannot leave the country because his sister is in hospital and his mother is too frightened to return to the passport office to get a new passport.

President George W. Bush and Tony Blair have for the last three years continually understated the gravity of what is taking place in Iraq. It has been frustrating as a journalist to hear them claim that much of Iraq is peaceful when we could not prove them wrong without being killed or kidnapped. The capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty in 2004, the elections and new constitution in 2005 have all been spuriously oversold to the outside world as signs of progress.

The formation of national unity government in Iraq is now being presented as an antidote to the present surge in violence. "Terrorists love a vacuum", said the Defence Secretary John Reid yesterday citing his experience in Northern Ireland. But one Iraqi official remarked caustically that the three main communites the Sunni, Shia and Kurds -- do not "hate each other because they do not have a government, but rather they do not have a government because they already hate each other."


U.S. Marine reported shot by Iraqi
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An Iraqi soldier allegedly shot and killed a U.S. Marine at a base near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday.

Another U.S. Marine then wounded the Iraqi soldier.

The shootings occurred Thursday near Qaim, 200 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. statement said.

''An Iraqi army soldier allegedly shot and killed the U.S. Marine on a coalition base'' near Qaim, the statement said. ''The Iraqi soldier was shot by another U.S. Marine.''

The incident is under investigation, the statement said. No further details were released, and Pentagon officials said they had no further information.

An earlier statement said the Iraqi was evacuated to a U.S. military in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The soldier's condition was unknown.

''Just as we as American military men and women trust one another with our lives, we also trust our Iraqi counterparts, and that trust has not wavered,'' the statement added.