Iraq War: Three years on

One way to get a sense of the situation in Iraq three years after the war began is to read the accounts of some of the journalists who still go there.  Journalists are now targets of insurgents and criminal gangs and their ability to travel and report is seriously limited.

Orville Schell recently reported for Salon on his experiences as a reporter in Iraq:  Baghdad: The besieged press 03/16/06 and In the Twilight Zone 03/17/06.  (Also at TomDispatch.com in one part.)

The journalists who speak Arabic are especially valuable sources of information because they can do their own investigations of stories, when they are able to move around in the country, and they can talk directly to Iraqis.  This long (12 1/2 single-spaced type pages) article by Nir Rosen is an example of the latter: On the Ground in Iraq: The roots of sectarian violence Boston Review Mar/Apr 2006.

He describes an incident which gives a good idea of how bad acts on the part of American soldiers can lead to more trouble, especially in an "honor culture" like Iraq's where clan members are expected to take revenge on those who injure or kill other members of the clan:

The Americans had come maybe 20 times before to search for weapons in the house were Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein, their wives, and their six children. They knew where to look for the single Kalashnikov rifle the family was permitted to own. They had always been polite. “This day they didn’t act normal,” Hussein told me. “They were running from all sides of the house. They kicked open the doors. They didn’t wait for us.” With Iraqi National Guardsmen standing outside, the Americans hit the brothers with their rifle butts. Five soldiers were on each man. Sabah’s nose was broken; Walid lay on the floor with a rifle barrel in his mouth. The Shia translator told them to kill Walid, but they ripped the gun out of his mouth instead, tearing his cheek. The rest of the family was ordered out. The translator asked the brothers where “the others” were and cursed them, threatening to rape their sisters.

As the terrified family waited outside on the road, they heard three shots and what sounded to them like a scuffle inside. The Iraqi National Guardsmen tried to enter the house, but the translator cursed them, too, and shouted, “Who told you to come in?” Thirty minutes later Walid was dragged into the street. The translator emerged with a picture of Sabah and asked for Sabah’s wife. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her. He tore the picture before her face. Several soldiers came out of the house laughing. ...

Hussein told me that three days before Sabah was killed, an American patrol had stopped in front of Radwaniya’s shops and the Shia translator had loudly taunted the locals, cursing and threatening them for being Sunnis. Sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia had been escalating throughout the year, and the Americans had done little to diffuse them.

Rosen believes that "the civil war had started at least a year and a half before" December 2005, i.e., mid-2004.

This is a wrinkle that I haven't heard described like this before:

In December 2004, Jordan’s King Abdallah warned of a “Shia crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shias had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq to commit atrocities against Shia civilians. In September 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran. In response, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr called the Saudi foreign minister a “Bedouin riding a camel” and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship. Jabr, who had commanded the Badr corps, also condemned Saudi human-rights abuses—particularly the repression of Saudi Arabia’s approximately two million Shias—and he mocked Saudi Arabia’s treatment of its women.

In Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabi Islam, Shias are known as rafida, which means “rejectionists.” A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shias areoutside Islam, and to Shias it is the equivalent of being called “nigger.” This is the same word Sunni radicals in Iraq and the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, use to describe Shias. Saudi Arabia’s two million Shias have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals, and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shia “rafida” collaborators.

This is one sign of the difference between Iraqi Sunni resistance groups and the jihadists in Iraq:

When the Jordanian al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi boldly declared war on Shias in a speech, Iraq’s radical Sunni leadership reacted quickly to condemn it. The [Sunni] Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq’s Shias were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans’ blessings and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allows one to seek revenge on an innocent person, they said, and accused Zarqawi of supporting the Americans’ hope to create civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile five resistance groups - the Army of Muhamad, the al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen and the Salehdin Brigades - also condemned Zarqawi’s statements as a “fire burning the Iraqi people” and explained that the resistance only attacked the occupiers and those who assisted them and did not base their attacks on sectarian or ethnic criteria.

His article has a number of anecdotes about meeting with various members of the resistance, or at least sympathizers of the resistance.