Handpicking Iraq's interim leadership to reflect its ethnic and religious makeup seemed like the right thing to do six months ago. But communal tensions are on the rise, deepening the country's ethnic and religious fault lines and casting doubt on prospects for installing a peacefully elected government next year.
While Iraqis revel in their newfound freedoms to speak, worship, publish and broadcast as they please, their future as a unified state is being tested by rivalries among Sunni Muslims, Shiites and Kurds jockeying for power after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Cobbled together by colonial Britain less than a century ago, Iraq has struggled for years with ethnic and religious rivalries.
The prospect of national dismem-berment may seem remote, but that possibility has been enough for Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey to warn publicly against steps which might lead to the division of this nation of 25 million. Clashes between majority Shiites and minority Sunnis are not uncommon. On Dec. 9, a Sunni mosque was bombed in Baghdad, killing three people. On Friday, a car bomb killed five people outside a Shiite mosque in Baqouba, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city in a mostly Sunni region.
Attacks on the offices of Kurdish political parties also are increasing, as is squabbling among members of the Governing Council -- the Iraqi interim administration of 13 Shiites, five Sunni Arabs, five Kurds, one ethnic Turk and one Christian -- over whether to adopt a federal system in which the Kurds would retain the substantial self-rule they have enjoyed in their northern provinces since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraqi politicians routinely explain away their differences as part of the country's newfound democracy and assure Iraqis that only dialogue, rather than violence, would be used to settle differences.
They accuse hard-liners and the media, especially Arab satellite news channels such as Al-Jazeera, of fomenting strife.
"There is no such thing as a 'representative' of Sunni Arabs," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud, a Sunni, when asked about his role on the Governing Council.
"I consider myself an Iraqi citizen first ... and I try to serve Iraqis, all Iraqis -- Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and others," he said in a newspaper interview this week.
But for Sunnis, the prospect of minority status in a future, Shiite-dominated government is unsettling, given their long ascendancy under the British and then under Saddam. Many Sunnis accuse the Americans of fanning sectarianism as part of a divide-and-rule policy. They complain that the Americans are paying excessive attention to the views of senior Shiite clerics on the political process, which is designed to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1 and put a democratically elected government in place by the end of 2005.
On the other hand, when it comes to resisting Kurdish autonomy demands, Sunni and Shiite Arabs on the council are united.
The patchwork face of post-Saddam Iraq is on vivid display. Iraqi TV broadcasts of the five daily Muslim calls for prayer include both the Sunni and Shiite versions. The Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday in November was observed on three different days to accommodate all faiths, and the Governing Council runs three religious affairs departments -- one for Shiites, one for Sunnis and one for non-Muslims.
Fair enough, an ecumenical-minded outsider might conclude. Wrong, argue many Iraqis, mostly Sunnis but also some secular-minded Shiites, who see the seeds of secession in the new Iraq.
"The sectarian and religious approach to politics in Iraq is very dangerous," warned Fahmi Howei-di, a prominent Islamic writer from Egypt who closely monitors religious issues in the Arab world.
"It has created a divide that will be difficult to mend or reverse in the future," Howeidi said.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS