Iraqis happy but anxious

BAGHDAD – Even as Iraqis celebrated the departure of the last American troops Sunday, the dangers left behind after nearly nine years of war were on full display. Politicians feuded along the country’s potentially explosive sectarian lines and the drumbeat of deadly violence went on.

The last U.S. convoy rumbled out of Iraq across the border into Kuwait around sunrise under a shroud of secrecy to prevent attacks on the departing troops. When news reached a waking Iraqi public, there was joy at the end of a presence that many Iraqis resented as a foreign occupation.

But the happiness was shot through with worry.

“Nobody here wants occupation. This withdrawal marks a new stage in Iraq’s history,” said Karim al-Rubaie, a Shiite shop owner in the southern city of Basra. But, he said, “the politicians who are running this country are just a group of thieves.”

In the morning, a bomb hidden under a pile of trash exploded in a mainly Shiite district of eastern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding four others. It was the latest in the near daily shootings and bombings – low-level but still deadly – that many fear will increase with the Americans gone.

Violence is far lower than it was at the worst of the Iraq war, in 2006 and 2007. But armed groups remain, and there are deep concerns whether Iraqi security forces are capable of keeping them in check without the help of U.S. troops.

Equally worrisome are the unhealed resentments between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority. The fear is that without the hand of American forces, the fragile attempts to get the two sides to work together could collapse and even turn to greater violence.

The main Sunni-backed political bloc on Sunday announced it was boycotting parliament to protest what it called Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attempts to monopolize government positions – particularly those overseeing the powerful security forces. The Iraqiya bloc has complained of security forces’ recent arrests of Sunnis that it says are “unjustified.”

The Iraqiya bloc warned that it could take the further step of pulling its seven ministers out of al-Maliki’s coalition government.

Also Sunday, al-Maliki ordered Vice President Tariq al Hashimi off a plane and had him held temporarily at Baghdad airport, on suspicion that members of his security detail took part in a string of assassinations, McClatchy Newspapers reported.

The confrontation followed the arrest of at least six members of the vice president’s security detail in the past two weeks, officials said.