Analysis: Iraq's New War

[norml]

Analysis: Iraq's New War

by Martin Sieff
Apr 9, 2006


WASHINGTON, April 6, 2006 (UPI) -- There is no longer one war raging in Iraq. There are now at least three different, though overlapping ones, and very soon their number could rise to four.
The first war, of course, is the already nearly three-year-old Sunni Muslim insurrection against both U.S. forces and the democratically elected Iraqi government in Baghdad. This is the war that understandably has preoccupied the American public, Congress and Bush administration policymakers.

But since the Feb. 22 bombing of the al-Askariya, or Golden Mosque, in Samara, the Sunni insurgents have succeed in provoking a massive and far-ranging grassroots Shiite reaction against them. This has been flaring on a far vaster scale on both sides than the Sunni insurgents -- originally led by a combination of former Saddam Hussein Baath party loyalists and al-Qaida extreme Islamists -- wanted to achieve.

And in the north, largely overlooked, the Kurds supported and protected by U.S. power, have been forcibly exerted their own control over resentful Assyrian and Turkoman minority communities. The Kurd-Turkoman conflict, almost totally ignored in the U.S. media, is particularly significant because Turkey, a key U.S. ally and NATO member and traditionally hostile to Kurdish independence, feels strong ethnic loyalty to the Turkomans from the days of the old Ottoman Empire.


snip


http://www.postchronicle.com/news/security/article_21213721.shtml