IRAQ: The next chapter?

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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