The Risk of Iraqi Civil War

by Max Boot


It hasn’t gotten much attention, but Iraq was badly shaken by an incident that occurred Friday in Fallujah: security forces fired on a crowd of anti-government protesters, killing at least seven people. The people of Fallujah got their revenge by killing at least two soldiers and kidnapping three more. As press accounts note, mourners in Falluja shouted, “The blood of our people will not be lost in vain,” and they set fire to an army checkpoint.

This is, to put it mildly, a worrisome situation. Fallujah was one of the epicenters of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, more generally, of Sunni resistance to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Along with the rest of Anbar Province, it has been relatively peaceful since the “surge” of 2007-2008, when most Sunnis elected to join with the U.S. and its Iraqi allies, but the situation is now becoming volatile because of the vendetta that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is pursuing against senior Sunni politicians.

Unless Maliki does something concrete to placate Sunnis and convince them that he is not a Shiite sectarian, then the odds are that some incident–if not this one, then some future clash–could well set off a more general outbreak of civil war. And of course with U.S. troops entirely gone, there is no external stabilizing force. The Iraqis are on their own.


Max Boot

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/28/the-risk-of-iraqi-civil-war/

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