IRAQ: The next chapter?

Ongoing violence in Shiite southern Iraq has pitted the grass-roots movement of Muqtada Sadr against the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Dawa party.

Alexandra Zavis' reporting on Basra today provides a look at what could very well be the next stage in the Iraq conflict  where violence is sparked by local power struggles as sides jockey to win October provincial elections.

If 2006 and 2007 saw intense fighting based on Sunni-Shiite divisions, now strife looks to be fueled by a battle for control of local governments.

Beyond southern Iraq, Sunni factions are feuding in western Anbar province. There, a senior tribal leader has warned the national Iraqi Islamic Party that it needs to leave the province. In northern Iraq, Kurds and Arabs are in competition. 

"We are going to see some problems between Shia and Shia and problems among Sunnis and Kurds, especially in Mosul," Sheik Fatih Kashif Ghitaa, the director of the Al-Thaqalayn Center for Strategic Studies, told The Times in December. "This is the price of democracy."

— Ned Parker in Baghdad

Photo : Iraqi soldier sits outside a hospital in Baghdad next to a poster of late Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Hakim. Credit: Ned Parker / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[tom]

Bush keeps saying we're making progress. I can't figure out the goal. Certainly no country wants a foreign occupying army patroling the streets. If the 15 Saudi nationals wanted to inflict harm by bankrupting the United States in an endless war they certainly accomplished what they set out to do.

[jeff]

Ever seem to notice when Bush opens his big mouth about progress and victory, something always heads south. Now the Sunni's are fueding. Look, the US is never going to settle this dispute between sunni and shia. Of course bush uses fear as a tool to prevent any type of withdrawl, you know the line "If we do not battle them there we will face them here". The ones he should be looking at are in Afghanistan and pakistan, he really should have kept Saddam "Boxed in" while finishing off Bin Laden. Sadly we have apparently learned nothing about the mistakes of vietnam. This administration lies so much, that even when or if they tell the truth I find it hard to believe, so as far as I am concerned the war was a mistake and will never end favorably.

[Douglas]

The heavy fighting in Basra, which US Forces have now been drawn into, providing air strikes, reminds me of a day, in 1968, when I lost my older brother over Hanoi, Vietnam.

I have to say that, given the recent turn of events in Iraq, I am filled with a tremendous sense of tragedy. Yes, histroy, it turns out, does repeat itself; and George W. Bush is surely beginning to look like the tragic figure of Lyndon Johnson.

If there were ever a time to pursue a new direction, it is now. I just hope that we, as Americans, have the courage to make that change and save someone like my brother.

[Daniel N. Fox]

On a day (Thursday, Mar. 27) when the green zone is hit with heavy mortar fire, and people there die, President Bush states that some kind of offensive is going on. I am afraid that common U.S. major media words such as "crackdown" , "clampdown" and "attack" sound false, and as a matter of fact, actually suggest our leadership is "cracked".

[William Joseph Miller]

Alexandra Zabis deserves a Pulitzer for her coverge. We've armed 80,000 Sunnis with AK-47's. And we expect them to give up their salaries of $ 10 a day and to turn in their weapons. (Ironically in this country we can't get gun owners to even license and register their guns, let alone turn them in.)
The Basra incidents show what can happen with this approach. Our soldiers will be in the middle of a shooting match between Sunnis and Shiites, and between one militia group and another. Is the surge really that much of a success
In the meantime, the longer we stay in Iraq,the easier it is for Islamic Fundamentalists to find new members and to recruit more terrorists. For each terrorist we kill, 5 more will take his place.
The Iraq war is insane. That also applies to one of the Iraqi war's chief archtects, John McCain. We need to start a negotiated setllement and a withdrawal of tropps. And, we need a leader who proposes a foreign policy that will actually eliminate terrorism by eliminating the cause for terrorist - a leader like Barack Obama