Unrest spreads around Iraq as crackdown on Shiite militias rages
Middle East News
Mar 26, 2008, 8:23 GMT
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this is a sign that the iraqi leadership and security forces are now confident and professional enough to take on the warlords and militias. this confrontation is inevitable and necessary to become a nation not another lebanon. the outcome is critical but, the courage of the iraqi government to face this problem has been long needed.
Sadam is gone was good....the outcome was thrown to the wind by the Iraqis when divisions within the nation were used by multiple of groups to meet their own ends. Iraq is a hopeless cause as a cohesive nation.
Time to split it up...Kurds to the north...sunni and shia to themselves.
They dont seem to like to get along. Even with the Infidels gone(americans). they will find an excuse to kill themselves anyways, so why bother enforcing the mayhem. The only way to clamp down is to do what Sadam did, and that would be totally pointless. Leave, and let the Iraqis decide if they want to blow each other up or not.
Leave it to the lousy scumbag brits to sell us out, and cut and run, requiring the US to go it alone in southern Iraq-alqaeda. But that's ok because we already won, we are currently winning, and we will always win any wars with the terrorist nation Iraq-alqaeda. Apprently the so called cease fire with the shia alqaeda terrorists is over. We do not want the troop splurge to go sour because of this development. My suggestion is to double the pay to the 80,000-100,000 sunni 'Awakening' ex-alqaeda terrorists from $300 per month to $600 per month. Then we hire them to help us kill the shia alqaeda terrorists, and their families. It may seem confusing, but a nation such as Iraq-alqaeda is a rogue regime that breeds terrorists, but that's ok too, because we have created a big magnet right over there to draw them in and kill them before they migrate to California with the other illegal aliens infiltrating our country.
The battles in Iraq will NEVER stop - there will continue to be fighting somewhere in the country long after all of us are gone. The U.S. has enough trouble with their own gangs in the cities, so why do they think they will quell fighting elsewhere? It's been reported that the U.S. has done a lot of good by building up facilities and schools there, but aren't there enough places in the U.S. that need the same assistance?
Any number of time before, al-Maliki complained when U.S. troops tried to stand against the Shia militia in Basra, and asked them to withdraw. He's demonstrated, time and again, that he was unwilling to let the U.S. do the job in the South, back when the Shia militias were LESS organized.
Now, years later, al Sadr has grown in influence, and the Shia have been battling amongs themselves over who will get to control the situation, and the oil. Our surge troops have been involved with the Sunni and battling al Qaeda, while the Shia problems around Basra were postposned due to al-Sadr's cease-fire, which now seems a memory.
al Maliki has had YEARS to get a central government together, INCLUDING getting the militias disarmed - that was a primary purpose of our 'surge'. We've spent a fortune in trying to train and arm an Iraqi army to replace the Sunni-led army of 2003 that 'schmuck Bremer' turned into the Sunni Insurgency.
Now the lid is off the box, and al-Maliki has to either demonstrate that the Iraqi army of today is ABLE AND WILLING to control the country, or not. Part of the Iraq Study Group findings were to get the neighboring nations involved in the resolution of this mess, and while the ISG report in total is now obsolete, the U.S. finds itself really the sole backup for al-Maliki, in any meaning sense.
In the ideal situation, al-Maliki and the other leaders reach the POLITICAL consensus to get the Shia to stop fighting, and to become part of a greater and peaceful Iraq - but U.S. forces would remain, anyway, to back him up. The Shia army was supposed to rout al Qaeda from the north several weeks ago - how's THAT going, guys?
On the other hand, if al-Maliki lives up to his past (in-)actions, the Shia resentment will spread around a country where they're a clear sectarian majority.
Jingoistic posters like SP4 who've taken a simplistic view of a complex set of issues, and parroted the Administration's ever-changing concept of a 'victory', while the sitation decays, are the real disgrace.
RE the stupid:
'My suggestion is to double the pay to the 80,000-100,000 sunni 'Awakening' ex-alqaeda terrorists from $300 per month to $600 per month. Then we hire them to help us kill the shia alqaeda terrorists, and their families.'
Key paragraph from the story below:
BUT THESE ARE LONG-TERM STRATEGIES, AND THE FIGHTERS NEED JOBS NOW. IF NOT, MANY OPENLY DECLARE THEY WILL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO WORK FOR THE INSURGENCY, WHICH HAS TRIED TO LURE SOME OF THEM BACK WITH OFFERS OF MORE MONEY.
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www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-gunmen21mar21,1,94576.sto ry
As calm returns to some areas, the U.S. military is faced with the question of what to do with the tribesmen it hired to defend their neighborhoods. After five years of trial and error, the strategy of recruiting tribesmen to help defend their neighborhoods against Islamic extremists has proved one of the most effective weapons in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.
But restoring a measure of calm to what were some of the most violent places in Iraq has in turn presented the U.S. military with one of its biggest headaches: what to do with the more than 80,000 armed men whose loyalty has been bought with a paycheck that cannot go on forever. 'We don't want to pay people to stand on street corners with guns if they don't need to be there. What we want to do is we want to get them into a transition to more gainful employment,' said Army Col. Martin Stanton, who oversees the effort.
After months of U.S. entreaties, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Shiite-led government grudgingly agreed in December to hire a portion of the mostly Sunni Arab fighters for the official security forces. But the process of vetting and approving the job candidates is painfully slow -- some say deliberately so -- and less than a third of them are expected to qualify.
U.S. and Iraqi officials are now hammering out details of a plan to revive local economies and create new opportunities for the fighters through vocational training, public works schemes, farm revitalization programs, micro-grants and business start-up loans. The two governments have committed $155 million apiece to the projects.
(Our troops are tied up supporting the Sunni and battling al Qaeda, and in maintaining the relative peace in Western Baghdad and areas to the north - we don't have the forces to move into a sectarian combat in the south. That's why we should have made sure that al-Maliki had control of the Shia situation years ago. The problem is spreading to other cities in the South).
www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1206 676800&en=53817004a2fa8d65&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
'An American military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, repeatedly sought on Wednesday to distance Western forces from the operation, saying that Mr. Maliki and his security ministers planned and carried it out on their own. He said American-led forces were on standby. There were also serious clashes reported Tuesday in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla, and General Bergner said Wednesday that fighting involving the Mahdi Army was continuing around the country.'
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BAGHDAD — A day after launching a huge operation that ignited heavy fighting in two of Iraq’s largest cities, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki gave the Shiite militias controlling the southern oil city of Basra an ultimatum on Wednesday: lay down their weapons within 72 hours or face more severe consequences.
As the fighting in Basra and Baghdad intensified on Wednesday, the American military command, speaking for the first time about the crackdown, characterized it as an Iraqi-led operation in which American-led forces were playing only an advisory role. An Iraqi hospital official said that the battle in Basra between Iraqi forces and Shiite militias led by Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, had so far claimed the lives of 40 people and wounded at least 200, figures that include militia members as well as Iraqi officers.
The fighting threatens to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war. Mr. Maliki, who considered the operation so important that he traveled to the city to direct the fighting himself, issued his ultimatum on Iraqi state television.
The fierce battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Mr. Sadr could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0327/p01s01-woiq.html
Baghdad - The usual teeming traffic in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite enclave, vanished Wednesday. Buses stopped running and shops closed. Only the intrepid motorist or occasional scurrying resident ventured out on streets patrolled by Moqtada al-Sadr's militiamen and marked by burning tires and roadblocks. Residents and Mahdi Army militants alike appeared to be bracing for a coming battle, guarding against US and Iraqi forces advancing to stop the rockets allegedly fired from Sadr City that hit the Green Zone again Wednesday for the third day since Sunday.
Although it's in Basra, the oil-rich southern city, where the Mahdi Army and Iraqi forces were locked in a bitter fight for a second day, killing at least 55, many in Baghdad fear that clash will trigger a new battle in Mr. Sadr's Baghdad stronghold. Already there were reports by US-funded Al Hurra TV, citing hospital sources, that at least 20 people have been killed and 140 wounded in sporadic clashes in Sadr City since Tuesday. Now, in a place where the US has done battle many times before, a sense of siege and helplessness has replaced some of the flickers of optimism that emerged over the past few months as a result of improved security made possible by the US surge and the Mahdi Army's seven-month cease-fire, which now looks to be shattered.
Across the Shiite enclave, home to almost 3 million people, US soldiers – some on foot and others in Stryker combat vehicles and Humvees – were out in force at all the major entrances, especially next to Iraqi Army checkpoints. Fallah (Farmer) Street and all other major thoroughfares were blocked by militiamen with rocks. Iraqi National Police in the area warned that militiamen planted bombs all along these roads to keep US and Iraqi forces out. Militiamen have also reportedly ordered all residents to turn off their generators.
Nukeum!
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lanceMar 26th, 2008 - 13:44:19
I am glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, but the cure seems worse than the disease. All in all it seems like this is just another example of typical behavior world-wide. If you are not having a fun time then whip up a slugfest somewhere around the world, Vietnam or whereever and have a good old party. Plus, munitions can be refreshed with the latest models. This is what happens when the excuse for invading a country is false and no one can figure out why foreign forces are there. Invasion forces for a civil war in order to plant foreign will in the domestic federalized government is just a stupid idea.
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