Could civil war erupt again? How fragile is the ramshackle coalition government of Shia, Kurd and Sunni led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Iraqi leaders I spoke to say the capacity to keep the present power-sharing agreement going is far more significant for the stability of the country than any enhanced security threat from al-Qa’ida following the departure of the last American soldiers. “The leaders behave like adversaries even when they are in the same government,” says Dr Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of parliament. “It would be better to have a government and an opposition, but nobody in Iraq feels safe enough to be in the opposition.”
Despite this anxious mood, Baghdad is less dangerous than it was in 2009, and infinitely better than it was in 2007, when more than a thousand bodies were turning up in the city every month.
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to realize the potential for extreme divisiveness and inter-ethnic/inter-religious-sect conflict in Iraq. And these are just the major culteral-religious points of friction in that country. When you throw in age-old clan animosity and warfare that exists between the various tribal groups/extended families, then violent and cruel warfare between the various Iraqi groups seems to be unavoidable.
The Shias and the Sunnis will receive support from powerful Shia and Sunni interests from outside of Iraq.
But the valiant Kurds will once again be the target of viscious attacks by Iraqis, Turks and Iranis and the rest of the world will sit back on its hands and let them suffer just as it has done several times in the 20th Century.
Shame, shame, shame.