Just another day in Iraq: 100 more fathers, mothers, sons and daughters killed
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaquin, Diyala Province, Iraq
THE INDEPENDENT, 17 July 2007
The United States surge, the use of the American troop reinforcements to bring violence in Iraq under control, is bloodily failing across northern Iraq. That was proved again yesterday when a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives in Kirkuk killing at least 85 people and wounding a further 183. The truck bomb blasted a 30ft-deep crater in a busy road full of small shops and booths near the ancient citadel of Kirkuk, setting fire to a bus in which the passengers burned to death and burying many others under the rubble. Dozens of cars were set ablaze and their blackened hulks littered the street. Some 25 of the wounded suffered critical injuries and may not live.
In Baghdad, at least 44 people were killed or found dead across the city, police said. They included the bullet-riddled bodies of 25 people, apparent victims of sectarian death squads.
The attack is the latest assault by Sunni insurgents on Kurds who claim Kirkuk as their future capital.
(...)
The problem is that nobody is quite sure on which side the Iraqi security forces are planning to fight. Often they do nothing: "The house of the deputy police chief is just 10 metres from a police station but somebody blew it up," Mr Zubaydi said scornfully. He ran through a list of police and army commanders in Diyala, all of whom were Shia and unlikely to help the Sunnis.
There are at least three different wars being fought in northern Iraq: Sunni against Americans; Shia against Sunni; Arabs against Kurds. Alliances can switch. The Kurds are the Americans' only sincere ally in Iraq but many of them are also convinced that the Americans in Kirkuk city have a tacit understanding with the Arab insurgents not to attack each other.
The US does not want to be seen as siding with the Kurds in their struggle to join Kirkuk and its oil fields to their semi-independent enclave, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in a referendum due at the end of the year. The US is restraining the Kurds but this may be more difficult after yesterday's bombings. "If we wanted to do so, we
could secure as far as Khalis," a town far to the south of Kirkuk in Diyala Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani president of the KRG, told me.
The US is caught in quagmire of its own making. Such successes as it does have are usually the result of tenuous alliances with previously hostile tribes, insurgent groups or militias. The British experience in Basra was that these marriages of convenience with local gangs weakened the central government and contributed to anarchy in Iraq. They did not work in the long term.
You can read the full article here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2776137.ece
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