For several years now, one of the more deadly parts of the civil war in Iraq has been the forced displacement of Iraqi civilians. It’s been a form of ethnic cleansing on a vast-but-slow scale — much of Iraq has been made incrementally segregated along Sunni-Shiite lines. What war supporters have argued would happen if the U.S. withdraws has already largely happened.
Some military officers, McClatchy reported last week, believe that there has been a drop in sectarian attacks, but not because of the surge: “[They believe] it may be an indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many neighborhoods and that there aren’t as many people to kill.”
Newsweek’s account on this is among the best I’ve seen anywhere.
The surge of U.S. troops — meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital — has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually “has increased the IDPs to some extent.”
When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias’ cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they’ve essentially won.
“If you look at pre-February 2006, there were only a couple of areas in the city that were unambiguously Shia,” says a U.S. official in Baghdad who is familiar with the issue but is not authorized to speak on the record. “That’s definitely not the case anymore.” The official says that “the majority, more than half” of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are now Shiite-dominated, a judgment echoed in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: “And very few are mixed.” In places like Amel, pockets of Sunnis live in fear, surrounded by a sea of Shiites. In most of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, residents are trapped behind great concrete barricades for their own protection.
As Matt Yglesias put it, “Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced.”
That is, tragically, exactly what’s happening. The sectarian attacks have dropped, not because of the surge, but because there’s no longer much of a point — bombings that were intended to ethnically cleanse parts of Iraq have been successful and are no longer needed.
Newsweek added:
Citywide, Sunnis complain that in the early phases of the surge, as Shiite militias refrained from attacks on U.S. troops, the Americans focused their firepower on Sunni insurgents. The implicit trade-off—pushed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and others—was that the Shiites would scale back their sectarian attacks once they felt safer. Instead militias like the Mahdi Army have become emboldened. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top ground commander in Iraq, recently noted that 73 percent of American fatalities and injuries in Baghdad in July were caused by Shiite fighters. That same month, for the first time since 2003, Shiite militants carried out as many attacks on Coalition forces as Sunni insurgents did nationwide. […]
Could this be the start of a civil war within Iraq’s civil war?
The Maliki government, which Sunnis do not trust, has asked Sunni residents to return to their old neighborhoods in exchange for a reward worth about $800 US. It’s not working — said a U.S. official familiar with refugee issues, “Sunnis are reluctant to go back to areas when it’s only Iraqi security forces there managing their safety. In a lot of cases security forces participated in their displacement.”
With or without us, the Iraqi civil war will end eventually — with a predictable outcome.