Iraqi Dinar Value - Civil war in Iraq is still a real possibility

Civil war in Iraq is still a real possibility

REALPOLITIK: David Pratt


ISN'T IT strange the way we seem to have taken our eye off the ball when it comes to events in Iraq? Preoccupied with the growing violence and rising British casualty rate in Afghanistan, suddenly it seems we have no appetite for news coming out of places like Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk and Mosul. It was not always like this, of course. Barely a few years ago Afghanistan was dubbed the "forgotten war" as world attention focused on defeating the insurgency in Iraq.


Today it is a different story, with our coverage only picking up when the death toll cannot be ignored. This was graphically illustrated last week when TV pictures showed the effects of bomb and mortar attacks that killed 95 people and wounded more than 500 in Baghdad.
Beyond these images of carnage, however, there is a distinct lack of incisive behind-the-headlines coverage precisely at the moment when Iraq's ethnic and religious faultlines once again appear to be cracking.



The implications of this fracturing could be profound not only for Iraq and its people but for the ongoing war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, recently bolstered by US and British troops redeployed there after the draw-down in Iraq.



As any intelligence analyst will confirm, it is often the accumulation of small details from comparatively insignificant individual events that point to the bigger long-term picture.
For example, take the seemingly run-of-the-mill report from Iraq last Friday about the discovery of a member of the Kurdish Peshmerga security forces found riddled with bullets in west Mosul. By Iraq's standards, nothing particularly unusual there, you might say. But this latest fatality is one of more than 100 deaths in mixed Arab-Kurdish areas over the past month.
While last week's explosion of violence in Baghdad appeared to be motivated by the now familiar - albeit still worrying - sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni insurgents, there are now other potentially more dangerous battle lines being drawn across the country. Most notably, that between Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurdish government based in the northern city of Erbil. At the core of this stand-off lie the Kurdish government's plans to expand the land under its control and the oil reserves it contains. Baghdad is unlikely to stand idly by and let this happen.



Last month, it was hoped that Iraqi Kurdistan's landmark election might ease the tension in this dispute over resources and territory, but the death toll on the ground suggests otherwise. Observers now consistently refer to the Arab-Kurdish "trigger-line", while US defence secretary Robert Gates recently identified the dispute between Baghdad and the Kurds as the single biggest threat to the country's stability.



Any confrontation with Baghdad arouses intense passions among Kurds who still remember Saddam Hussein's genocidal assaults such as Operation Anfal, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the 1980s. While three years ago it was the Sunni-Shia divide that threatened to plunge Iraq into civil war, today it is this old antagonism between Arab and Kurd that could tip the country over the edge.



Not surprisingly, in an effort to defuse this mounting tension, the US military is proposing to deploy troops for the first time in a strip of disputed territory in northern Iraq. Last Monday, the top American general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, said US troops would be stationed alongside Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen in the province of Nineveh, near oil-rich Kirkuk, the scene of several recent high-profile bombings and shootings like that of the Kurdish Peshmerga soldier on Friday.



While Odierno insists the US involvement will not be "full-on", it must be the last thing Washington needs as it struggles to keep tabs on the situation in Baghdad and commit to containing the Taliban threat in Afghanistan in the wake of controversial elections there. So much for President Barack Obama's hopes of having all US combat troops out of Iraq within 12 months.



For the moment, any proper lasting peace remains a pipe dream for many ordinary Iraqis and it will stay that way if the security situation is once again allowed to unravel. These days, from Mosul to Baghdad, the countless individual killings of Kurd and Arab, Sunni and Shia often fail to make the headlines. But be under no illusions, their cumulative impact could yet drag Iraq into the abyss.