Even people in the provinces have the feeling that Baghdad is under extreme pressure right now as if they feel that violence lessened in their provinces only to increase in Baghdad. I had relatives and friends calling me to check on us, express sympathy and sometimes offer me and my family a place to stay at for a couple weeks in this or that province.Una batalla que utilitza la rivalitat intercomunitària com a element de justificació de les milícies armades.
Anyway, I do not consider the recent wave of violence as sectarian violence even though it assumed a sectarian shape...both terrorists/insurgents and outlaw militias are concerned about their existence more than about defeating their sectarian counterparts, therefore each party uses the existence of the other as pretext for its own activity. Our friend Shalash the Iraqi put it eloquently in one of his posts just a week ago: There will be no excuse for the Mehdi army to exist if terror groups ceased to exist and there will be no excuse for the terrorists to exist when the Sadr gangs and rats of Badr drop their weapons. one depends on the other... Whenever the government tries to disarm the militias, the terrorists would come to attack at the strongholds of the militias to give them reason to exist and whenever the government tries to attack terrorist strongholds the militias would take to the streets to distract the government and drag its forces into side battles... Baghdad is the key to Iraq, and Iraq is the key to the Middle East, and from this fact this battle draws its significance.
En aquesta batalla, el govern iraquià no sembla disposar dels recursos necessaris ni dels criteris més encertats:
Some time ago we pointed out the poor intelligence capabilities of the government compared to that of the militants and it looks like the current security operation did not deal seriously with this defect, on the contrary the gap seems to be even growing giving advantage to the militias and insurgents. Again I feel I must point out that security operation of the government is still not doing much to deal with the escalating violence. Personally I was for a plan based on securing one piece of territory at a time instead of attempting to secure the entire capital at once (see our earlier post) and that's because I believe the government does not possess enough tools to cover Baghdad in its entirety. The concept of power concentration seems a reliable way that can be applied in limited areas effectively and once a given area is secure that power could move to secure adjacent areas. I still think that clearing Baghdad should start from the center-out, not the other way around.
