While streets are safer, newest violence targets top officials
Khaled Al-Obaidi, until recently a leading candidate to be Iraq’s defense minister, was driving with his armed motorcade in the northern city of Mosul on Sunday when a powerful "sticky bomb" attached to his car exploded, injuring him and a bodyguard. Al-Obaidi was hospitalized to remove shrapnel from his leg. He was reportedly driving a police car in an attempt to hide his identity.
Ali Al-Lami, a senior member of Iraq’s legal establishment, wasn’t as lucky. Last Thursday he was shot dead in Baghdad by pistol-toting assailants, who used silencers in a drive-by shooting. Al-Lami headed the Justice and Accountability Commission, a body charged with preventing people associated with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party regime from returning to politics.
As America’s 46,000-person peacekeeping force prepares to leave Iraq this December, political violence is welling up again and many Iraqis are beginning to wonder aloud whether it would be better for the American troops to stay a bit longer. It is not simply an upsurge in violence that worries the country’s leaders, but the fact that it is now targeting them rather than people in the street.
"The forces should stay for at least two more years," Haitham Numan, director of Asharq Research Center, a Baghdad-based think tank, told The Media Line. "Those who demand their withdrawal are speaking more emotionally than rationally." Americans had a moral obligation to stay in Iraq and rectify the strategic mistakes made since the country’s occupation in 2003, he said.
Delaying the withdrawal would put U.S President Barack Obama in an awkward position. After eights years and more than 4,000 U.S. casualties, the fighting in Iraq is unpopular with American voters who go to the polls in 2012. The prolonged U.S. presence has also complicated America’s image in the Arab world, where Obama has sought to mend ties strained relations during the war years.
Ordinary Iraqis are much safer today than they were in 2007, when the average civilian death toll reached 2,000 victims a month. Now, it is Iraq’s politicians and senior civil servants who have most to fear. In April, 50 Iraqis were assassinated by shootings and car bombs, the Ministry of Interior told the Washington Post in early May, a steep increase compared to the previous average of 20 deaths a month.
"[Al-Lami’s killing] was perpetrated in the wake of unfortunate security conditions which have noticeably deteriorated in the past months," Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister
Ruz Nouri Shawees said in statement Sunday. "Assassinations with silenced pistols have increased, as have terrorist acts with sticky charges, car bombs and missiles."
Ronen Zeidel, director of research at the Center for Iraq Studies in Haifa University said that the main menace threatening Iraqi stability is not a takeover by Islamist Sunni Al-Qaida operatives, but rather tacit threats of violence made by Shiite leader Muqtada Al-Sadr, through his organization, the Mahdi Army. Underscoring his interests in the U.S. departing as soon as possible, Al-Sadr staged a huge rally last Thursday in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood against the American presence in Iraq, with tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen marching in unison, Associated Press reported.
"The central issue in Iraq today is whether to ask the Americans to extend their stay in the country," Zeidel told The Media Line. "The majority of supporters are scared to speak up, but there is a small group of Iraqis who support an unlimited extension of the American presence in Iraq."
Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s position on the matter is still unclear. But some Iraqi commentators have publicly indicated they prefer to see American forces stay in Iraq for the time being.
"No one wants foreign forces to remain on Iraqi soil," wrote columnist Karim Abed in the Iraqi daily Al-Sabah on Saturday. "But we must examine our position before we display our national enthusiasm which may backfire, allowing Baathist and terrorist remnants to establish a foothold among us."
Numan said the U.S. needed to deeply reform the flawed Iraqi political system before leaving the country. In Iraq’s coalition government, the three key security portfolios, namely defense, state security and interior, are still unmanned, temporarily occupied by Prime Minister Al-Maliki.
Zeidel of Haifa University said the recent increase in political assassinations in Iraq gave more credence to the proponents of continued American presence in Iraq, but he doubted that mainstream Iraqi politicians would muster the courage needed to publicly request this.
"Asking the Americans to stay doesn’t look good. It’s like admitting failure; asking the occupier to continue his occupation," he said.
The presence of American troops has diminished on Iraqi streets, with soldiers remaining largely in their barracks. But at least some Iraqis are scared of being abandoned by the U.S. during an increasingly unstable period in the Middle East.
The Arab Spring has created new elements to the regional balance of power, with regimes in Syria, Libya and Yemen pushed against the wall and Saudi Arabia taking a new, assertive stance. Iran has also been encouraged by the unrest, or at least so fear many Arabs, including Iraq’s Sunni minority.
"The Iraqis are fearful of being symbolically abandoned," Zeidel said. "Even with 10,000 American troops in Iraq, you can be sure that Obama is still thinking about you."
But Bashar Al-Mandalawi, an Iraqi freelance journalist, put the blame for violence in Iraq on political infighting, adding that it was the responsibility of the government and the Iraqi army to stabilize the country.
"Assassinations are no worse today than they were two years ago," he told The Media Line. "I think neither the Iraqis nor the American soldiers would be pleased to extend their stay here. It’s time for them to leave."