IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn

by a huge fuel vehicle took place at 7am targetting at a police centre. The area includes a paediatrics hospital, a neighbourhood, a filling station where a long line of waiting people (mostly the poor who cannot afford buying benzene from the black market). The casualties were mostly them, children at the hospital, a whole family who were by chance there and some officials going to their offices in the university. It was more horrible than one can imagine or describe."

      The professor did not expect life in Mosul to get better and her pessimistic expectations have been fulfilled. For centuries, Mosul has been one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Middle East. Sadly, this is now ending. Kurds are in flight. So, too, are Christians. Fanatical Jihadi Islamists persecute them as being no different from US soldiers. When US soldiers were accused of damaging a mosque in a raid, two Christians churches in Mosul were blown up by way of retaliation.

      The fighting is likely to get worse. Under article 140 of the Iraqi constitution passed by a referendum in 2005 - though Nineveh province voted against - there must be a referendum on joining the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by the end of 2007. The Kurds are determined to get back the lands from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. Above all, they want Kirkuk and its oilfields. The vote will be by district, so existing provinces, whose boundaries were gerrymandered by Sad-dam Hussein, will cease to exist. The Kurds expect large areas of eastern, northern and western Nineveh province will join the KRG, but not Mosul city, because it has an Arab majority. The Kurds are absolutely determined to get what they consider their rights after years of persecution, expulsion and genocide. They rightly think that they now have an historic opportunity to create a powerful near-independent state within Iraq: They are America's only effective allies in Iraq; they are powerful in Baghdad; the non-Kurdish parts of the Iraqi government are weak. Goran confirms that they may postpone the referendum for a short period, but not for long. He suspects that the province will split into two, one Kurdish and part of the KRG and the other Arab.

      The history of Mosul over the past four years since the fall of Saddam Hussein has some lessons for resolving the conflict in Iraq in the long term. Many of the crass errors made in the first days of the occupation in Baghdad did not happen in Mosul. American and Kurdish commanders have often been able men. But the end result has been disastrously similar in both cities. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that Iraqi communities mean exactly what they say and will fight to get it. In Iraq, this means that the Kurds are going to recover their lost lands; the Sunni are going to get the Americans out and the Shia, as the majority, are determined to be the primary force in government.

      Friday, 4 May 2007

DO NOT TRUST THE IRAQI POLICE

      "Be careful," warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad, "be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army."

      He added that the level of insecurity in the Iraqi capital is as bad now as it was before the US drive to make the city safe came into operation in February.

      The so-called "surge", the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.

      There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified because they do not know if the men in uniform they see there are, in reality, death squad members.

      Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that only Sunnis use the name Omar. Three days later he was found dead.

      I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled over at an army checkpoint. I had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was. We were lucky. He merely looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: "Keep well hidden."

      The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of bodies found went down. This was mainly because the Shia Mehdi Army was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.

      But the Sunni insurgent groups increased the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. Now the sectarian body count is on the rise again. Some 30 bodies, each shot in the head, were found on Wednesday alone.

      The main new American tactic is proving counterproductive. This is the sealing-off of entire neighbourhoods so there is only a single entrance and exit.

      Speaking of Sunni districts such as al-Adhamiyah, a government official said: "We are creating mini-Islamic republics."

      This is borne out by anecdotal evidence. The uncle of a friend called Mohammed (nobody wants their full name published) died of natural causes. The family, all Sunni, were unable to reach the nearest cemetery in Abu Ghraib. Instead they went to one in Adhamiyah. As they entered, armed civilians, whom they took to be al-Qa’ida from their way of speaking, asked directly: "Are any of you Shia?" Only when reassured that they were all Sunni were they allowed to bury their relative.

      The failure of the "surge" comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is fac-tionalised. The two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, and Adel Abdel Mehdi, a Shia, may make conciliatory statements, but one Iraqi observer noted: "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."

      The Sunni feel they are fighting for their lives. Their last redoubts in east Baghdad (aside from Adhamiyah) are being overrun by the Mehdi Army. The Sunni insurgent groups, notably al-Qa’ida, are on the offensive in west Baghdad, where they are strongest. When the Americans succeed in driving away Shia militia their place is taken, not by government forces, but by Sunni militia.

      People in Baghdad are terrified of being killed by a bomb or bundled into the boot of a car and murdered. Less dramatic, but equally significant in forcing people to flee Iraq for Jordan or Syria is the sheer difficulty of maintaining a normal life. Much of the trade in the city used to take place in open-air markets. But only one is now open. This is in Karada, but many people no longer go there because it has come under repeated attack.

      So many areas are now sealed off that there are continuous traffic jams. If drivers try to avoid the jam by driving off the main road they may enter an area where militiamen may kill them. One friend who got back from Syria found that, because of an attack on a government patrol, his neighbourhood was closed to traffic. "I had to walk for 40 minutes with my suitcase," he lamented.

      Even in dangerous neighbourhoods such as Beitawin, off Saadoun Street in central Baghdad, notorious for its criminal gangs even in Saddam's time, people were queuing for petrol for hours yesterday evening because they have no choice.

      A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting, if unlikely, scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lakeside scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq.

      Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US.

      The only "gated community" that functions successfully in Baghdad is the Green Zone itself, the four square miles on the right bank of the Tigris that is home to the government and the US embassy. It is sealed off from the rest of Iraq by multiple security barriers and fortifications. Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called "this little chunk of Texas". Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond.

      Monday, 7 May 2007

STONED TO DEATH FOR ELOPING AND CONVERTING

      The stoning to death of a teenage girl belonging to the Yazidi religious