After post-election calm, violence on the rise in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Violence is escalating sharply in Iraq after a period of relative calm that followed the January elections. Bombings, ambushes and kidnappings targeting Iraqis and foreigners, both troops and civilians, have surged this month while the new Iraqi government is caught up in power struggles over cabinet positions.
Many attacks have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents, according to the U.S. military, Iraqi officials and civilians and visits by Washington Post correspondents. More than 100 Iraqis and foreigners have died in the last week.
“Definitely, violence is getting worse,” said a U.S. official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “My strong sense is that a lot of the political momentum that was generated out of the successful election, which was sort of like a punch in the gut to the insurgents, has worn off.”
The political stalemate “has given the insurgents new hope,” the official added, repeating a message Americans say they are increasingly giving Iraqi leaders.
This week, at a checkpoint bunker in Tarmiya where insurgents downed a helicopter, a teenager in sunglasses clutching an AK-47 marked the limits of authority of the Iraqi army.
“I wouldn’t advise going there,” the young Shiite Muslim recruit said, meaning a few hundred yards up the road to Tarmiya, a Tigris River town of Sunni Muslim landowners who were loyal to Saddam Hussein. “Those are some bad people there.”
Roadside bombs and attacks on military targets are up by as much as 40 percent in parts of the country over the same period, according to private security estimates. Hundreds have died in the last week alone.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi leadership remains in limbo. The attacks, coming as officials continued to haggle over government posts, have eroded some of the hope that followed the elections. Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders, most of whom are building the first democratically elected Iraqi government of their adult lives, have let power struggles fill nearly one-third of their government’s planned 11-month run.
At best, deal-making on some key posts appears stuck where it was two weeks ago, when Ibrahim Jafari, a formerly exiled Shiite leader, accepted the prime minister’s job and the task of forming a promised national-unity government. There was increasing talk that dissenters within the Shiite and Kurdish-led governing coalition are trying to prolong negotiations until Jafari misses an early May deadline to form a government. This could put the prime minister job into the hands of another Shiite candidate.
Soldiers and police across much of Iraq have fallen into inaction. The Defense and Interior ministries are run by interim chiefs slated for replacement. Initiatives by the Iraqi forces against the insurgents have all but ceased.
The insurgency has found new hide-outs, gathering points and recruiting areas in western, central and eastern Iraq, along the Tigris River, as well as other locations.
“The government is useless! I have stopped depending on it,” Ali Hali, a 29-year-old Shiite man, cried last week among hundreds of wailing residents of the southern city of Najaf who gathered in anger at retrieval of the latest in scores of bodies taken from the Tigris. How the people were killed is not known. Shiites said they presumed them to be victims of Sunni extremists.
Tensions over the killings in the area focused on the town of Madain, where rumors of Sunnis kidnapping and killing Shiite townspeople were rife. Some Shiite national leaders warned of sectarian war. Threats of retaliatory violence against innocent Sunnis came from Shiite strongholds.
For residents of Baghdad, where security forces that are comparatively well engaged have been unable to stop daily bombings, the return to violence has brought some residents to despair.
“This is terrible,” said Waleed Sharhan outside a mosque where two children were among the nine dead from a bombing Friday. “There is no hope that this country will be better.”