Basra burns again
By Trevor Royle
MILITARY PLANNERS call it the tipping point, the decisive moment when circumstances conspire to replace one set of certainties with the precise opposite, when what passes for normality slides into anarchy and the authorities are powerless to do anything to halt the mayhem.
In Iraq this weekend, the expression has taken on a new and alarming significance: following a brief period of hope the country has once more been plunged into a maelstrom of communal violence, with mass demonstrations, killings and gun battles between the security forces and Shi’ite militias.
No one knows for sure if Iraq has reached its own tipping point - as ever in this benighted country, making predictions can never be an exact science - but all the signs suggest that the country is slipping into a new crisis.
This is not just another escalation of violence but a confrontation which could quite easily turn into a civil war between government forces and the rival militia groups, which represent different Shi’ite groupings as well as rogue gangs and other criminal tendencies. So serious is the situation that the US-backed government has extended the time limit until April 8 for the militias to disarm, a sure sign that the original deadline of this weekend was being ignored by the fighters on the streets.
At the end of a strife-torn week the facts speak for themselves.
An outbreak of fighting between Iraqi security forces and the Mehdi Army militias in Basra has left over 100 dead and many more wounded. In Baghdad, a mortar attack in the protected green zone killed three and wounded 15, while thousands of supporters of the Shi-ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took to the streets and plunged neighbouring Sadr City into violence, threatening the precarious ceasefire that has held the peace since last autumn.
Hilla, Kut and Diwaniya have also seen sporadic violence, and in the northern city of Kirkuk two peshmarga security officers were killed by a car bomb. Worse followed in Nasiriyah on Friday when firefights between local police forces and Shi’ite militia resulted in scores of casualties dead and wound
Perhaps the most damaging incidents occurred on Thursday when rogue militias blew up one of the two main export pipelines near Basra, a move that reduced the country’s oil exports by a third and pushed up the price of oil by one US dollar per barrel. Three other pipelines were shut down as a result of the attacks, a disruption which the country can ill afford at a time when it is struggling to make itself less reliant on US aid. [more]