[Texgreen] Civil war in Iraq imperils entire region

[Roger Baker]

... As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward  
for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one  
proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and  
Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision  
ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive  
scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United  
States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America  
came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not  
fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told  
Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently...

"The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in  
Iraq, if you could neutralize them," it would ease some of the many  
pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann said. But he said the two countries  
may demand a mighty trade-off: for Syria, U.S. help with its biggest  
stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran,  
U.S. compromise over its nuclear program.

Hiltermann acknowledged the difficulty. "I'm saying it's required,"  
he said. "I'm not saying it's possible."...


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<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/15/ 
AR2006111501490.html>

Sectarian Strife in Iraq Imperils Entire Region, Analysts Warn

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- While American commanders have suggested that civil war is  
possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in  
Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and  
that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the  
flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries.

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United  
States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not  
threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and  
Arab analysts and political observers.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a  
failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing  
into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project  
director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from  
Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the  
disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at  
the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to  
the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on  
U.S.-Arab relations.

As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for  
solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one  
proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and  
Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision  
ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive  
scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United  
States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America  
came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not  
fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told  
Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at  
the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars  
-- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and  
International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq  
a battleground for the region.

Obaid described widespread interference by Iranian security forces  
within Iraq. He urged Saudi Arabia, which is building a 560-mile wall  
on its border with Iraq, to warn Iran "that if these activities are  
not checked," Saudi Arabia "will be forced to consider a similar  
overt and covert program of its own."

In Damascus, a Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warned  
that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full- 
scale civil war. "Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved,  
Saudi Arabia, Syria," said the analyst, who spoke on condition he not  
be identified further.

"Regional war is very much a possibility," said Hiltermann, the  
analyst for the International Crisis Group. Iraq's neighbors "are  
hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region," he said.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad last month ranked Syria and Iran  
with al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the country's principal Sunni Arab  
insurgent groups, in terms of destabilizing influences in Iraq.  
Despite that assessment, the United States has not held substantive  
talks with Syria regarding Iraq since 2004 or with Iran since the war  
began in 2003.

Diplomats and analysts increasingly are urging the Bush  
administration to reach out to both countries as part of a regional  
approach to quelling Iraq's troubles. Former secretary of state James  
A. Baker III, leader of a panel preparing a set of policy  
recommendations for the Bush administration, already has endorsed the  
idea of seeking the help of Iran and Syria.

"The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in  
Iraq, if you could neutralize them," it would ease some of the many  
pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann said. But he said the two countries  
may demand a mighty trade-off: for Syria, U.S. help with its biggest  
stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran,  
U.S. compromise over its nuclear program.

Hiltermann acknowledged the difficulty. "I'm saying it's required,"  
he said. "I'm not saying it's possible."

In Baghdad's Shiite stronghold of Sadr City late last month, aides to  
one of the country's leading Shiite clerics held a rally to urge  
followers to bide their time until the American forces leave the  
country. The rally was called by followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, a  
strongly anti-occupation figure whose bloc is a leading partner in  
the current Shiite-led government and who is one likely claimant to  
power should the Americans withdraw.

"Will America win?" a speaker in a brown turban demanded before the  
more than 1,000 protesters, as a brewing storm whirled dirt and trash  
and pelted ralliers with drops of cold rain. Loudspeakers shot his  
question back across the square.

The men thrust their fists in the air, shouting their answer out to a  
grim, gray sky: "No, no! America will not win!"

Between 2 percent and 5 percent of Iraq's 27 million people have been  
killed, wounded or uprooted since the Americans invaded in 2003,  
calculates Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for International and  
Strategic Studies.

"This is civil war," he said.

Since midsummer, Shiite militias, Sunni insurgent groups, ad-hoc  
Sunni self-defense groups and tribes have accelerated campaigns of  
sectarian cleansing that are forcing countless thousands of Shiites  
and Sunnis in Baghdad to seek safety among their own kind.

Whole towns north and south of Baghdad are locked in the same  
sectarian struggle, among them the central Shiite city of Balad,  
still under siege by gunmen from surrounding Sunni towns after a  
bloody spate of sectarian massacres last month.

Even outside the epicenter of sectarian strife in the central region  
of the country, Shiite factions battle each other in the south, Sunni  
tribes and factions clash in the west. Across Iraq, the criminal  
gangs that emerged with the collapse of law and order rule patches of  
turf as mini-warlords.

Since the war began, 1.6 million Iraqis have sought refuge in  
neighboring countries; at least 231,530 people have been displaced  
inside Iraq since February, when Shiite-Sunni violence exploded with  
the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra,  
according to figures from the United Nations and the U.N.-affiliated  
International Organization for Migration.

There used to be a time when Sunnis and Shiites "were living like  
family. We were married to each other, we all had Sunni friends, we  
all had Shiite friends. It was all like a balloon that exploded," a  
gaunt, weeping Sunni woman said in her bare apartment.

Until this year, the 41-year-old widow and former teacher -- who  
would identify herself only as Um Mohammed, fearing retaliation --  
lived in Husseiniyah, a Shiite district of Baghdad. But after Shiite  
militias forced all the Sunnis out, she fled to a too-costly, too- 
small place in the overwhelmingly Sunni neighborhood of Sadiyah, on  
the western side of the Tigris River.

The Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization, two militias loyal to the  
Shiite religious parties now governing Iraq, had taken over her old  
neighborhood by this spring, she said. Mahdi Army officials  
commandeered the two rental homes she relied on to support herself  
and her children. They forced the Sunni tenants out and installed  
Shiite families, who paid her rent through the Mahdi Army office, at  
a greatly reduced price set by the militia, the widow said.

Letters placed at the doors of Sunni families -- sometimes with  
bloody bullets tucked inside the envelopes -- warned Sunnis to leave.  
Shiite boys as young as 10 took to wearing the black clothes of the  
militias, and they promised her 10-year-old son, Ahmed, they would  
burn him alive in his house at night as he slept.

Um Mohammed reluctantly took her only other child still at home, a 15- 
year-old daughter, out of school and married her off to an older man  
in Sadiyah in a bid to provide her protection among fellow Sunnis.  
When Um Mohammed received a third letter threatening death, she and  
Ahmed finally moved to Sadiyah. Longtime Shiite neighbors sadly  
watched her leave but were too afraid of the militias to help her  
move, she said.

"I want to return to my home. But we are safer here," she said.

Across the Tigris River from Um Mohammed, another widow, Zayneb  
Khatan, a Shiite, sat in her equally plain new home. After gunmen  
shot and killed her husband in front of their home in the Sunni  
neighborhood of Cairo as he went to buy bread, Khatan fled with her 2- 
year-old daughter and the clothes on their backs.

"Some Sunnis are good," she said as she sat on a secondhand divan.  
"But I cannot say I will ever live among them again."