Civil war: For Iraqis, it's now official

[tocqueville]

Welcome to civil war
By Pepe Escobar

Undeclared civil war in Iraq has been raging for months. Now it's "official": using the customary audio clip on a website, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - who may or may not be a cipher, but is certainly the leader of Monotheism and Holy War, or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers - has declared "all-out war" on Iraqi Shi'ites.

To prove it, he unleashed Black Wednesday - including a horrendous attack in the Kadhimiyah neighborhood in Baghdad, with at least 112 dead and more than 200 wounded, all of them poor, helpless Shi'ite construction workers, many of them enticed toward the killer with promises of jobs before he detonated his lethal load. Baghdad was paralyzed on Wednesday, trying to cope with more than 150 dead and more than 500 wounded in a string of coordinated attacks marking the bloodiest day in the country since the end of major combat two years ago.

According to the Zarqawi audio, "The al-Qaeda Organization in the
Land of Two Rivers is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha, wherever they are in Iraq". Rafidha is the pejorative Arabic term referring to Shi'ites as apostates. "As for the government, servants of the crusaders headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, they have declared a war on Sunnis in Tal Afar." So, following Zarqawi's logic, the civil war against Shi'ites is a response to what happened in Tal Afar.

Tal Afar is a poor northern town in the middle of the desert whose majority population of roughly 200,000 is 70% Sunni Turkmen and 30% Shi'ite Turkmen. Just as former prime minister Iyad Allawi was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Fallujah, current prime minister Jaafari ordered what amounts to ethnic cleansing in Tal Afar.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GI16Ak03.html

[damntexdem]

1. How wonderful to have a formal declaration of war.

So much neater, that way.

Was it hard for him to get the declaration through the Al Qaida Congress? ;-)

[enigma000]

2. A Jordanian can't declare an Iraqi Civil War n/t

[tocqueville]

3. Escobar means that Zarquawi has proclaimed :

"I allied myself with the Sunnis and we are going to kill as many shiites as possible"

read the whole article it's very interesting

"Tal Afar revisited

Yet one more heavily hyped Pentagon/Baghdad production yielded no box office results - for obvious reasons. The Salafi jihadis, reportedly a couple of hundred, who were holed up in Tal Afar easily melted away, like the fish in Mao Zedong's pool of resistance. And the "pool" itself - most of the civilian population - turned into a stream of refugees. The operation was doomed to failure from the beginning because the Iraqi "army" involved consisted basically of Kurdish Peshmerga militias supported by local Shi'ite Turkmen informers. They may be Turkmen, but they are allied with Sunni Arabs.

Once again, the Sunni Arab Salafi jihadis got away by using classic guerrilla tactics: while the Pentagon/Jaafari armory was chasing shadows in empty Tal Afar, they mounted spectacular, deadly, highly visible attacks against Shi'ites in Baghdad, the heart of power.

So the pattern is always the same. The Baghdad/Pentagon axis unleashes massive, highly publicized repression - in Fallujah, in Tal Afar (many times over), in Qaim near the Syrian border, soon in Ramadi (it has been already announced); the Salafi jihadis melt away and later regroup.

The palpable effect is always the same, as University of Michigan professor Juan Cole suggests: de-urbanization of the Sunni Arab heartland. In other words, ethnic cleansing. Yet it's folly to believe that the Pentagon/Jaafari axis will be able to depopulate or destroy every major Sunni city opposed to the new, emerging Shi'ite-Kurd majority in power. Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers has fully capitalized on the matter. The voice on the Zarqawi tape warns Sunni Arabs to "wake up from your slumber ... the war to exterminate Sunnis will never end"."

[Kurovski]

4. Well, there we have it. just as every expert on the ME predicted.

Too bad Bush didn't let the American people know what we were signing on to.

Recommended.

Asia Times is an excellent source of news.