Informed Comment
Al-Hayat: Northern Iraq is a sectarian tinderbox after Saturday's massive car bombing of a Shiite village near Baqubah in the mixed Diyalah province. The Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) called for calm and avoidance of reprisal killings, seeing the bombing of the Shiites and the killing of 25 Mahdi Army militiamen in an ambush in Baghdad on Friday by Sunni Arabs as steps toward sectarian civil war. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Shiite Badr Corps militia is denying any link to the assassination last week of Saadoun al-Janabi, a defense lawyer for one of Saddam's relatives.
Some 51 clan elders from the Sunni Arab and Kurdish families of Mosul agreed with policemen in the city that they will return it to the control of armed guerrillas if the Interior Ministry implemented its decision to fire Ninevah's police chief, Ahmad Muhammad al-Juburi, who is accused of corruption. Hundreds of armed men surrounded the provincial headquarters on Saturday evening to protest al-Juburi's firing. US troops stopped the protesters from storming the building. The armed protesters, including police and civilians, surrounded a number of government buildings. They shouted through megaphones, complaining of Kurdish domination of provincial offices.
The clan leaders complained in a letter to Jaafari that no official investigation of al-Juburi had been carried out. They threatened to turn the city into a hotbed of insurgency.
Al-Juburi himself charged on Saturday that Kurds and Shiite Arabs had connived at his dismissal because they hoped to roil the province and therefore keep its 1.7 million inhabitants, a majority of them Sunni Arabs, from voting in large numbers in the December 15 parliamentary elections. He warned that they would follow the same tactics in Salahuddin and Anbar Provinces (other Sunni Arab strongholds).
Mosul exploded with violence in November of 2004 when 4,000 policemen suddenly resigned and masked gunmen emerged to police the city of over a million (Iraq's third-largest). The current situation seems so tense that there is a danger of the repetition of that scenario, which helped prevent Sunni Arabs from being properly represented in parliament, since it threw Ninevah into chaos.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that many Sunni Arabs in Ninevah are convinced that their province actually defeated the constitution by a 2/3s margin in the Oct. 15 referendum, and that the constitution was therefore in reality shot down and is illegitimate.
A large number of Sunnis believe the constitution referendum was stolen by the Shiites. Election observers did indeed find more votes for the constitution from areas expected to be staunchly against it.
Iraq edges closer to civil war, which will quickly escalate to regional war, which will put in harms way all the oil in the Middle East!
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