BAGHDAD: A feud between Iraqi Sunnis and the Shia authorities they accuse of marginalising their community is driving a deadly spike in violence that stops short of all-out conflict for now, experts say.
Attacks including bombings that ripped through worshippers in mosques and cut down shoppers in markets killed over 430 people in Iraq so far in May, 461 in April and 220 or more every other month this year.
Crispin Hawes, the Middle East and North Africa director for the Eurasia Group consultancy, said policies of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki that have politically isolated Iraqi Sunnis are the main factor behind the spike in violence.
They have encouraged both “radicalisation” and passive tolerance of militants. “Pretty much since the last US soldier knocked the dust from his boots as he crossed the border (in late 2011), Maliki has gone after a succession of Sunni Arab politicians,” Hawes said.
Maliki made an unsuccessful call on MPs to remove Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, a Sunni who had said the premier was “worse than Saddam Hussein,” the day that the last US soldiers left, while an arrest warrant was issued for then-vice president Tareq Al Hashemi, another Sunni, the following day. Hashemi fled Iraq and has since been sentenced to death multiple times in absentia for crimes including murder.
Maliki also sought to remove “Sunni Arab officers from the military (and) militarised, increasingly, population centres in western and northwestern Sunni Arab-dominated provinces in Iraq,” Hawes said. “It has been a consistent ratcheting up of pressure on that community that has progressively isolated and restricted their role in Iraqi politics,” he said.
AFP
